Improving Patient Outcomes Through Untethered Patient-Centered Health Records

Patient generated data, or personal clinical data, is considered an important aspect in improving patient outcomes. However, personal clinical data is difficult to collect and manage due to its distributed nature. For example, they can be located in multiple places such as doctors’ offices, radiology centers, hospitals, or some clinics. Another factor that can make personal clinical data difficult to manage is that it can be heterogeneous data types such as text, images, charts, or paper-based documents. In case of emergencies, this situation makes personal clinical data retrieval very difficult. In addition, since the amount and types of personal clinical data continue to grow, finding relevant clinical data when needed is getting more difficult if no action is taken. In response to such scenarios, we propose an untethered patient health record system that manages personal health data by utilizing meta-data that enables easy retrieval of clinical data. We incorporate cloud-based storage for easy access and sharing with caregivers to implement continuity of care and evidence-based treatment. In emergency cases, we make critical medical information such as current medications and allergies available to relevant caregivers with valid license numbers only. Clinical data needs to be stored or made accessible from one place for easy sharing and retrieval. Well-managed personal cloud space could outlive the lifetime of personal health records system (PHRS) since the discontinuity of the service does not affect the data stored in the cloud space. In our approach, we separate the clinical data from applications in order to make the data independent from the application. Also, the users can have alternative applications for their clinical data. Such independence motivates users to use PHRS with flexibility