Cloud-based service for secure Electronic Medical Record exchange

The importance of healthcare information technology has increased dramatically during the past few years. Researchers, developers, and companies have placed efforts to develop mobile, web, desktop, and enterprise e-health applications. This development raised the importance of interoperability and data exchange between e-health applications and Health Information Systems (HIS), which resulted in increased concerns for securing sensitive data and data exchange. This paper emphasizes standardizing a data exchange mechanism and interoperability between HISs and e-health applications across a cloud-based service. The proposed service provides a single point of entry for retrieving Electronic Medical Records (EMR) among the various HISs that a patient record is stored in and for any e-health application seeking such information. Moreover, this research proposes a unified secure platform that provides developers, health care providers, and organizations access to a framework to retrieve and manage medical records and Personal Health Records (PHR) among various subscribers. The proposed service and platform have been qualitatively evaluated among a sample of physicians, patients, and hospital administrators from the Faculty of Medicine, Alexandria University, Egypt. Results are promising and a prototype implementation is underway.