Consortium, and is considered a component of the
semantic web. On January 2008, SPARQL became
an official W3C Recommendation.
4 CONCLUSIONS
The sophistication of information technology and
communications is changing our society. In the
ongoing healthcare reform, there is an increasing
need to control the cost of medical care. In this
context the significance of patient centered
healthcare care is extensively recognized as it can
help by providing information to the patients, their
families and physicians, not only for illnesses, but
also for prevention and wellness. This, however,
requires that patient’s health information as well as
other relevant medical information is presented in
appropriate format according to individuals
understanding and abilities.
PHRs have the potential to dramatically
contribute to patient centered healthcare as they
enable patient to become more involved and
engaged in their care, and allow other authorized
stakeholders to access information about patient that
has not been previously been available or difficult to
access electronically. Hence, the change that can be
caused by the deployment of PHR systems could
also have a significant impact on the efficiency of
administrative and clinical process in healthcare
sector, and thus will give rise for considerable cost
savings.
However there are many obstacles to the
widespread use of patient centered healthcare. For
example, it is turned out that most patients are not
satisfied with the medical treatment information on
the Web instead they trust on the medical
information that are managed by medical authorities.
A problem however is that how this information can
be targeted for patients.
The analysis of this problem led to the
introduction of the notion of the PHB, which is an
extension of PHR in that all healthcare providers,
who are involved in patient’s healthcare, augment
the PHB by links to relevant information entities.
This PHB based healthcare models presumes that
the information entities used in a therapy are
accessible from the web, i.e., each entity should
have a url (uniform resource locator). This,
however, does not require the creation of new
content as relevant information entities already exist
in digital form, and which can be accessed by the
systems used by the healthcare providers.
An interesting arising question is also that how
we can get patients involved in maintaining and
using a PHB (or PHR in general). Obviously, at least
by providing them by incentives we can increase the
amount of patients that keep PHBs, e.g., by
providing a discount for the patients who keep a
PHB faithfully. Also by showing that using a PHB
will help them to get better medical care would
increase their use.
In our future work we will extend the PHB
system by active elements. By an active element we
refer to an expression or statement that is stored in
PHB, and expect the element to execute at
appropriate times. The times of action might be
when a certain event occurs such as an insertion of a
blood test result. Then depending on the inserted
values an action can be taken such as generating an
email to patient’s personal physician.
REFERENCES
Agarwal R, Angst C. M., 2006. Technology-enabled
transformations in U.S. health care: early findings on
personal health records and individual use, In Galletta
G, Zhang P, (Eds.), Human-Computer Interaction and
Management Information Systems: Applications (Vol.
5). Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., pp. 357-378.
Angst, C. M., Agarwal, R, Downing, J., 2008. An
empirical examination of the importance of defining
the PHR for research and for practice, Proceedings of
the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on
System Sciences.
Bauman, A., Fardy, H., and Harris, H.,“Getting it right;
why bother with patient centred care?,” Medical
Journal of Australia, 179(5), pp. 253-256, 2003.
CCD, 2009. What Is the HL7 Continuity of Care
Document? Available at: http://www.neotool.com/
blog/2007/02/15/what-is-hl7-continuity-of-care-
document/
CCR, 2009. Continuity of Care Record (CCR) Standard.
Available at: http://www.ccrstandard.com/
Daconta, M., Obrst, L.and Smith, K. 2003. The semantic
web. Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons.
Davies, J., Fensel, D., and Harmelen, F., 2002. Towards
the semantic web: ontology driven knowledge
management. John Wiley & Sons.
Gillespie, R., Florin, D., and Gillam, S., “How is patient-
centred care understood by the clinical, managerial
and lay stakeholders responsible for promoting this
agenda?,”Health Expectations, vol 7 No 2, pp. 142-
148, 2004.
Kaelber, D. Jha, A. Johnston, D. Middleton, B. and Bates,
D., 2008.A Research Agenda for Personal Health
Records (PHRs), J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc.,
November 1,15(6). pp. 729 - 736.
Little, P., Everitt, H., and Williamson, I., “ Observational
HEALTHINF 2011 - International Conference on Health Informatics
392