Health Information Exchange for Home-Based Chronic Disease Self-Management -- A Hybrid Cloud Approach

The exchange of health information between patients and multiple stakeholders empowers digital home based self-care, which can deal with the challenge of increasing chronic disease prevalence. Cloud computing has the potential to provide a more imaginative long-term solution. However, concerns over pattern of data sharing, confidentiality of sensitive health data, and service integration need to be addressed. This paper aims to identify a promising and achievable cloud based solution which enables patients to share the health information when multiple stakeholders are involved for different purposes. A prototype on the case of type 2 diabetes is implemented as a proof of concept for the proposed hybrid cloud based solution. The hybrid cloud environment is composed of Open Stack and Amazon Web Services with open source libs. And the exchanging health data contains in HL7 CCD format. According to the simulation, it shows that the health data sharing between patients and multiple stakeholders has been achieved. And the problems of interoperability and privacy have been partly solved within the proposed solution.