OBJECTIVE: We have developed a prototype Personal Health Record (PHR) system that can replace traditional paper-based personal health diary with structured clinical details for healthcare. Because numerous disparate electronic versions of medical record systems are found unable to share medical information among hospitals, pharmacies and clinicians, the proposed PHR system can be used to facilitate patient care.

METHODS: The PHR system has been implemented on a flash memory (USB drive) that is found to be compact, light weight, cost-effective and sufficient enough to handle a large amount of clinical data. International communication standard HL7 has recommended Continuity of Care Document (CCD) that can provide complete and accurate summary of an individual health and medical history. Care documents stored in USB can also support alerts, reminders, self-management, and stakeholder communication in a standardized manner.

RESULTS: The proposed PHR system consists of modules that help collect distributed patient information from multiple sources to generate individual care document (CCD) as personal health record. The preliminary experiment has demonstrated an acceptable performance. That is, the PHR is found to integrate and share various clinical data such as medications, procedures, patient demographics from admission system, test results from LIS, DICOM images from PACS, bio.signals from patient monitors. Especially, the PHR system was tested by connecting to standardized monitoring device (Mediana device) to collect ECG data. The PHR system had received 3410 HL7 messages for 1 hour, then generate CCD document.