A secure approach for health information exchange using mobile personal health records / Mohamed Shabbir Hamza Abdulnabi
Sharing patient information between different care providers has been identified early as a key enabler for quality and cost-effective healthcare. Being in the information age, it seems natural to expect immediate access to health information in the right place at the right time and in a usable f...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Published: |
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/8701/1/Mohamed_Shabbir_Hamza.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/8701/6/shabbir.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/8701/ |
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| Summary: | Sharing patient information between different care providers has been identified early as
a key enabler for quality and cost-effective healthcare. Being in the information age, it
seems natural to expect immediate access to health information in the right place at the
right time and in a usable format. However, the realization of such vision is taking too
long, and the level of providers’ engagement is witnessing a decline. Difficulties in
ensuring global connectivity, interoperability and concerns on security have always
hampered attempts by the governments to deploy nationwide Health Information
Exchange (HIE) successfully. An important question to pose is how new approaches
can address the same issues of interoperability and interconnectivity without disturbing
existing infrastructure and imposing much costs. Bearing in mind the pervasiveness and
power of modern smartphones, this thesis proposes an alternative approach for
nationwide HIE that can replace or complement governmental efforts, such as the
Malaysian MyHIX project. The main objective is to introduce the idea of a multicomponent
and distributed solution for large-scale HIE as a novel approach that differs
from the existing central approaches but does not disturb the current set-up and attribute
no significant costs to any of the involved stakeholders. The proposed approach
provides a distributed framework in which patient data are carried by the patients
themselves in the form of mobile Personal Health Records (mPHRs), typically on their
handheld smartphones. This method uses the concept of mPHR in a novel way –as
distributed storage units– and is to be compared with the current central approaches that
aim to collect patient data in central repositories and circulate them via central engines.
The individual mPHR systems are capable of interconnecting securely with multiple healthcare systems through a suitable interface. This interface is another app that runs
on a special terminal device (such as a tablet) at the end of the healthcare system to
ensure the interoperability with the patients’ smartphones. The detailed design and
operation of the proposed approach is provided and justified, resulting in a multicomponent
and coherent framework for HIE. The proposed framework consists of three
main components: an mPHR at the side of the patient, legacy Health Information
System (HIS) at the side of healthcare providers, and an interface device between the
two. The whole framework is validated through a prototype implementation using
software apps for the mPHR and the interface layer, and open source Electronic Medical
Record (EMR) systems to represent legacy HISs used by healthcare providers. Various
simulated use cases and scenarios have been presented to show the operation of the
framework and its overall validity. Endorsement of the proposed framework can lead to
a practical solution to the hard problem of HIE that avoids the cost of implementing a
single global network to connect all healthcare systems, and ensures that the required
data of each patient is available whenever and wherever it is needed. |
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