Personal Health Book Application for Developing Countries

We introduce a Personal Health Book application that is used as a portable repository for Personal Health Records (PHR) in order to alleviate healthcare organizational problems in developing countries. The Personal Health Book application allows low literate people to access and carry their own medical history from a rural healthcare provider to an urban healthcare provider. This will improve the efficiency of medical care and lower costs for health clinics in underserved areas. This paper introduces a software application that can be ported onto a USB Smart Card or/and managed by smartphone or personal computer connected to cloud computing environment. The Portable Health Book application aims to ease the problem of interoperability between health clinics by accepting any file format and contents and applies a decomposed database to categorize, group and reorganize the data. Querying the application’s database, the consumer can create a unified report presentation that is understandable by the consumer, family, and healthcare provider. We tested the Personal Health Book framework by importing PHRs in an extensible markup language (XML) format with a basic structure, without checking the PHR content from the Grameen Portable Health Clinic database in Bangladesh and from different departments from a hospital in Japan. The Personal Health Book was able to generate a human readable output as its database reorganize and store any type of PHR including sensor device data. Keywords—Personal health records; Patient centered healthcare; Database design; Developing countries; Extensible markup language