DISTRIBUTED HEALTH RECORD MANAGEMENT FOR HETEROGENEOUS HOSPITAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Abstract

A patient can visit numerous hospitals or clinics in his lifetime which therefore disseminates his medical data among multiple hospital information systems (HIS), managed by each hospital independently. The integrated Patient Health Records can be kept on portable equipment such as USB or mobile device [1], and can be retained with the patient as he moves from one HIS to another. A backup of the PHR should be retained on the cloud for refurbishing PHR in case of theft or for a remote access. The proposed system on the cloud, shall maintain backup of healthcard consisting of references to each HIS having patient’s actual clinical data along with medical information like medication, lab tests. To integrate the dispersed data, we propose a distributed health record management system that shall query individual HISs for clinical data of a particular patient and then integrate all the responses together in standardized way to generate the aggregated health record in case of loss of PHR based healthcard. The information we receive in response from diverse sources may all be in different formats. The proposed system shall translate all responses into HL7 messages that together may represent the integrated Electronic Health Record (EHR) of the patient. We have deployed the backup of records on a distributed file system such as Hadoop DFS and results indicate that it can provide high availability, reliability and performance as compared to a single file system access.