MOVING FROM REMOTE PATIENT MONITORS TO CLOUD-BASED PERSONAL HEALTH INFORMATION SYSTEMS: A Way to Practicing Patient-centered Chronic Care Model

摘要

Recent advances in remote patient monitoring allow patient to transmit vital health data from their home to physicians' offices and receive health coaching from their healthcare providers based on the clinical data they have sent. Unfortunately such a remote monitoring technology only provides the connection between patients and healthcare providers and thus does not support new emerging healthcare models such as patient-centered care, pharmaceutical care or chronic care models. These healthcare models need technology solutions that (i) support the co-operation within patient's healthcare team (i.e., connect patients, patient's family members and healthcare professionals), (ii) provide a platform for sharing patient's healthcare data among the healthcare team, and (iii) provide a mechanism for disseminating relevant educational material for the patient and the healthcare team. In this paper, we describe our work on designing a personal health information system, which supports patient remote monitoring and the new emerging healthcare models as well. The key idea is to develop the system by integrating relevant e-health tools through a shared ontology and to exploit the flexibility of cloud computing in its implementation. In developing the ontology we have used semantic web technologies such as OWL and RDF.