Development of a Health Information System in the Mobile Cloud Environment

Currently, the medical patient records available are not properly stored and organized in many hospitals. In case of emergency it becomes really cumbersome for the doctor to retrieve the required patient medical record immediately. Research has however, been carried out in the past in storing and retrieving of medical records electronically. In the context, there still exists the challenge in storing these data and sharing them across different hospital networks in case of emergency. In addition, maintenance of the servers, software used and their licensing are inherent issues which require the need for appropriate technical personnel. Also as the number of patients grows the amount of storage capacity to store the medical data also increases which puts a burden on the hospital towards upgrading the server and storage capacity. So taking the above-mentioned issues into consideration, we here propose a solution by way of developing a system employing a mobile cloud facilitating storing of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) which also enables data retrieval using mobiles. The study also focuses on the design of mobile data exchanging and data processing using information system approach. One advantage in the proposed system is that the cloud service provider takes care of the maintenance of the servers. The application developed will be hosted on cloud that will be responsible to handle and manage the patient data, and provide access to retrieve and store data with proper authentication. These services can be accessed by the hospital from the cloud by paying for the service towards their business needs without having to spend huge money on buying servers, software and so on. The solution proposed has been validated specifically for the Brunei health care services as a case study. The details are provided in the paper.