A Patient-Centric Distributed Architecture for Electronic Health Record Systems

Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems are widely considered a crucial tool for the excellence in patient care, especially in the context of chronic diseases. Nevertheless, patients often do not have full control on their clinical data, which are generated by different health centers. Moreover, collecting, storing and providing clinical data are intensive tasks for health structures, which frequently suffer for shortage of investments. In this paper, we present the results from the CCE Project, which proposes a distributed architecture for clinical data, in which the patient is considered the focal point of the process. The patient is the real owner and holder of his/her data, and is provided with a smart card containing all the clinical reports, prescriptions or medical imagery. On the other hand, each clinical center does not have to invest in expensive data centers, because the proposed solution takes advantage of a distributed architecture, which includes the already operating local servers. In conclusion, we expect that the proposed architecture would bring benefits both to patients, giving them the desired centrality in the care process, and to health administration, that could exploit the same infrastructure for better addressing health policies, for example implementing epidemiological and drug safety research.