Personal Health Book - A Novel Tool for Patient Centered Healthcare

Patient centered healthcare is based on the assumption that physicians, patients and their families have the ability to obtain and understand health information and services, and make appropriate health decisions. This in turn presumes that patient’s personal health information is presented according to individuals understanding and abilities. Based on this argument our research has focused on analysing whether the existing PHRs (Personal Health Records) support patient centered healthcare in an appropriate way. The analysis of these questions led to the introduction of the Personal Health Book (PHB). It 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. In this paper we consider two approaches for maintaining PHBs: one extends XML based PHRs while the other exploits semantic web technologies in PHBs’ implementation. In particular, we present the advantages that can be achieved in using semantic web technologies such as RDF