Development of a personal electronic health record card in the United Kingdom

In most emergency situations, health professionals rely on patients to provide information about their medical history. However, in some cases patients might not be able to communicate this information, and in most countries, including the UK an on-line integrated patient record system has not been adopted. Therefore, in order to address this issue the ongoing project MyCare Card (MyC², www.myc2.org) has been established. The aim of this project is to design, implement and evaluate a prototype patient held electronic health record card. One of the tasks involved in the project was to develop a Graphical User Interface (GUI) software, which provides access to the data stored on the card. The requirements for this software had to be established via questionnaire surveys and end user evaluations, conducted simultaneously with the software development. This paper is addressing development of the MyCare Card GUI software. It also overviews the hardware and open-source software solutions selected for the MyCare Card implementation.