Ubiquitous Electronic Medical Record (EMR) for Developing Countries

Around the globe, Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) has been evolved either by governments or healthcare providers. The utilization of these technologies has resulted in the improvement of healthcare services all over the world. This evolution has been characterized by availability, reliability, serviceability to patients, and has been enhanced with increased cost and time efficiency. As such, new systems and terms have been established. Electronic Medical Record (EMR), which can also be used interchangeably with Electronic Health Record (EHR) is considered to be the main transformation in healthcare information technologies. EMR has been aimed to reduce and eliminate existing paper based approaches. Many countries have adopted the use of EMR systems all over the world. However, these systems differ from country to country even though they serve the same purpose. The differentiation of implementing the EMR system often leads to incompatibility, which complicates cooperation between healthcare providers, and also compromises the efficient use and analysis of data that can be gathered from different locations or systems. This thesis highlights and addresses the implementation of EMR on cloud-based systems to enable improvements in HIT. In particular, the scope of this research focuses on the use of EMR or EHR in Saudi Arabia, and establishes clinical information transaction standards that can be easily adopted by the different EMR application architectures available. Furthermore, the implementation of a cloud-based system is proposed for standard EMR to be used by both public and private healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia. The advantage that cloud technologies facilitate is the availability of data regardless of the patient, clinician, or physician’s location. Similarly, these technologies enable a linkage and utilization of the Health Information Exchange (HIE) by healthcare researchers and providers to invest in data through online and offline cooperation. Support for the standardization of the EMR system on cloud-based technology will minimize or at best prevent human’s errors, repetition or duplication of records, and reduce cost of operation and time