Exploiting Cloud-Based Personal Health Information Systems in Practicing Patient Centered Care Model - Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies - page 316

monitors, personal health records, health-oriented blogs, and health-oriented informa-
tion servers. It is also turned out that by gathering these functionalities into one sys-
tem we can achieve synergy, i.e., achieve functionalities that would not be obtainable
by any of the e-health tools independently.
In gathering the functionalities we have adapted the ideas of knowledge centric
organizations to PHIS, i.e., we have revolved the e-health tools around a health
oriented knowledge base. So, all the e-heath tools share patient's health data. Further
by exploiting the characteristics provided by cloud computing we can easily ensure
the interoperation of patient's healthcare team: accessing the PHIS requires only in-
ternet connection. Instead of the prevailing systems provided by healthcare organiza-
tions do not provide appropriate technology for co-operation as their use is devoted to
organization's healthcare personnel only.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, in Section 2, we motivate our
work by considering the recent advances in patient remote monitoring. Then, in Sec-
tion 3, we present the requirements of PHIS that we have derived from emerging
healthcare models, and then, in Section 4, we analyze the suitability of cloud compu-
ting for satisfying these requirements. In Section 5, we present the architecture of the
knowledge oriented PHIS and the PHIS-ontology that is shared by the e-health tools.
In Section 6 we describe how the PHIS-ontology can be exploited in promoting pa-
tient's medical education and in delivering relevant information within patient's
healthcare team. In Section 7, we illustrate how XSLT-transformations is used in
transforming XML-coded medical data in the format that is compliant with the PHIS-
ontology. Finally Section 8 concludes the paper by discussing the challenges of our
solutions as well as our future research.

2 Remote Patient Monitoring

Telemedicine is the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another
via communications to improve a patient's [13]. Telemedicine is viewed as a cost-
effective alternative to the more traditional face-to-face way of providing medical
care [14].
Telemedicine can be broken into three main categories: store-and-forward, inter-
active services and remote patient monitoring.
• Store-and-forward telemedicine involves acquiring medical data and then transmit-

ting this data to the system that is accessible to patient's physician. So it does not
require the presence of patient and physician at the same time.
• Interactive services provide real-time interactions between patient and physician. It

includes phone conversations, online communication and home visits.
•

Remote monitoring enables medical professionals to monitor a patient remotely
using various technological devices. Remote monitoring is above all used for manag-
ing chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and asthma.
Nowadays remote patient monitoring technologies are becoming a more sophisti-
cated, integrated, and systematic approach to healthcare that can be personalized
to each patient's medical needs. In particular, Personal Health Systems (PHSs)
go beyond the simple remote patient monitoring systems in that they enable the