The iCabiNET system: Harnessing Electronic Health Record standards from domestic and mobile devices to support better medication adherence

Recent reports by major health institutions have shown that up to one half of patients do not take their medications as prescribed, which undermines treatment outcomes and increases the costs of healthcare. The implantation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) is seen as a key step in all the strategies envisaged to address this problem, and there are several major initiatives to standardize such artifacts. In this paper, we present a system that aims to promote medication adherence in contexts of daily life, interacting with standards-based EHR repositories from both domestic and mobile devices. This approach represents an advance with regard to previous works on smart medicine managers, which could only record information in local logs and required the users to enter their prescriptions and medications regimens manually. Experiments with real users confirm the added value of applications with automatic access to EHR and interfaces for various types of devices. Research highlights EHR standardization is seen as a key step to address the problem of medication nonadherence. We present mechanisms to interact with standards-based EHR systems from domestic and mobile devices. openEHR specifications have made significant contributions to international harmonization efforts. Our work with openEHR has benefitted from the open-source supporting tools and reference implementations. Real users have appreciated the possibility of having the iCabiNET download medical prescriptions automatically.