Phealth Infrastructure for the Medical Care Service Unit at the University of Cauca

Health systems around the globe, especially in developing countries, are nowadays facing the challenge of delivering effective, safe, quality personal and non-personal health services to those who need it, independent of time and location, and with minimum waste of resources. The World Health Organization (WHO), as part of his agenda to strength health systems, has defined a framework consisting of sixth pillars (building blocks): service delivery; health workforce; information; medical products, vaccines and technologies; financing; and leadership and governance (stewardship) Especially important in the context of this project is the information building block, and in particular health information systems able to support communication and adequate use of health information by using information and communication technologies (ICT). Research, innovation and practical solutions have been developed to accomplish this challenge, but normally these solutions are complex, expensive and inaccessible. Especially in developing countries, most of medical knowledge, information and data still remain in paper form, and even where it is digitized, it often resides in separated repositories and formats which make it difficult to share and use to support clinical and public health decision making. Furthermore, sharing information is hampered by the lack of a unique patient identification and security services, which impacts patient privacy. For accomplishing the aforementioned challenges, Electronic Health Records (EHR), as the core application of any eHealth environment, have to be first in place. EHR is defined as a repository of information regarding the health status of a subject of care. EHR information have to be created, used, storage and retrieved. This functionality is provided by electronic health record systems (EHR-S). Following, personalized health (pHealth) services are necessary. pHealth is characterized for being provided in highly distributed environments independent of time and location (ubiquitous environments), mediated by the subject of care´s status (commonly a patient), his needs, wishes and intentions. pHealth services, unlike to traditional eHealth services, result in individually tailored diagnosis and therapy including prevention, home care, elderly and lifestyle services. EHR in personal settings are also called Personal Health Records (PHR). Future-proof Electronic Health Record systems for eHealth and pHealth settings have to be open, scalable, flexible, portable, distributed, secure, standard-conform, semantically interoperable, service-oriented, user accepted, and lawful. Therefore, the research question addressed in this applied research project is, how to provide a basic infrastructure which is scalable, flexible, secure and service-oriented and semantically interoperable for the delivery, management and deployment of personalized health care services (pHealth) for the Medical Service Unit at University of Cauca in Colombia?