Entering information about medication intake in standard Electronic Health Records from the networked home

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are a crucial element towards the implantation of information technologies in healthcare. One of the goals pursued with these artifacts is to prevent medicine misuse, for which EHR standards define fields to record medical prescriptions and medication regimens. Unfortunately, the information stored in an EHR about how and when the patient does take his/her medicines is most often imprecise and incomplete, which implies severe health risks and brings down the benefits of technology. There exist solutions to get accurate records from inpatient settings (i.e. when the patient is treated in hospital), but not from contexts of daily life (e.g. when the patient takes medicines in home or at work) even though these are breeding ground for medication misuse. In this paper, we present an approach to fill in this gap, building on a system that monitors medicine intake from within a residential network, and relying on European standards for the storage and exchange of health-related information.