Towards Patient-Centered Telemedicine

Abstract — Patient-centered care is an emerging healthcare model that is changing how people think about health and about the patients themselves. It emphasizes the coordination and integration of care, and the use of appropriate information, communication, and education technologies in connecting patients, caregivers, physicians, nurses, and others into a healthcare team where the health system supports and encourages cooperation among team members. However, in spite of the widespread adoption of telemedicine, existing telemedicine applications do not support patient centered-care. In this paper, we present our designed cloud based telemedicine system that supports patient-centered care. It exploits Personal Health Records (PHRs) in sharing patient’s clinical documents, and it manages medical consultation requests by exploiting a Consultation ontology. The system and the PHRs may be located anywhere in the Internet, and its consulting organizations may include any healthcare provider having the ability for consultation