Design For a Patient-Centric Medical Information System Using XML Web Services

Patients´ medical information is dispersed on several providers´ medical information systems making personal medical information management a difficult task for patients. Given this situation, there is a need for patients to be able to easily access their patient data from the different providers´ systems so as to promote effective management of their medical information. The main objective of this work is to propose a design for a system that will alleviate the personal health information management process for patients by providing them a single point of access to their medical information from disparate healthcare providers´ systems over the Internet. The proposed design for this system is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) Web services. An evaluation of a prototype shows that the design allows patients an easy means of managing their health information and the design is also scalable, extensible, secure and interoperable with disparate healthcare providers´ information systems