Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 6, numbers 3 and 4, 2014 // View article

Developing a Data Infrastructure for Patient-Centered Telemedicine

Authors:
Juha Puustjärvi
Leena Puustjärvi

Keywords: telemedicine; patient-centered care; personal health records; CCD standard, cloud computing; ontologies; eHealth ecosystem

Abstract:
Patient-centered care is an emerging healthcare model that is changing how people think about health and about the patients themselves. It emphasizes the coordination and integration of care, and the use of appropriate information, communication, and education technologies in connecting patients, caregivers, physicians, nurses, and others into a healthcare team where the health system supports and encourages cooperation among team members. However, in spite of the widespread adoption of telemedicine, existing telemedicine applications neither support patient centered-care nor the interoperation of relevant e-health tools. In this paper we present a cloud-based telemedicine consultation server, which manages telemedicine consultation request and their allocation to consulting physicians. It also aids physicians to access patients’ health documentation either through a Personal Health Record (PHR) or Personal Health Information System (PHIS). Although both ways are suitable for supporting patient centered telemedicine the PHIS is superior in that it integrates the functionalities of a variety of e-health tools, and thus provides a holistic approach for personal healthcare. However, the integration of e-health tools requires the introduction of a shared ontology and the transformation of patients’ health records in the format that is compliant with the shared ontology.

Pages: 229 to 239

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2014

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660