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TopIntroduction
The Patient Health Record (PHR) is defined broadly as the representation of the health information, wellness and development of a person (ISO, 2012), and more specifically as “an electronic application through which individuals can access, manage and share their health information and that of others for whom they are authorized, in a private, secure and confidential environment” (Markle, 2003). The rapidly growing body of scientific literature concerning various aspects of ePHRs is aligned with common sense that multiple contemporary trends, such as personalized medicine, self-monitoring, and self-management of chronic health issues, the right of individuals to own and handle their personal health data, find in ePHRs a necessary condition for their future progress (Roehrs, da Costa, Righi, & de Oliveira, 2017). However, in terms of implementation and real-life adoption, the record is very poor, and one could argue that there is not yet an application or an application paradigm, that is widely adopted and in the same time including all the characteristics the aforementioned definitions suggest.
We identify three major reasons that have contributed to the extremely limited results of the attempted implementations:
CO.R.E. as a project includes the design and development of a working prototype ePHR that addresses all three of these factors “by default and by design”, as well as stakeholder adoption and real-world implementation considerations.
TopThe Co.R.E. System
In order to build trust, it is self-evident that patient privacy and by extend data security-integrity is of paramount importance and needs to be well defined and clearly explained. CO.R.E.’s architectural design (as shown in Figure 1) ensures that even the maintainers and the database administrators have absolutely no possibility of identifying the physical person that owns any piece of data stored in the system. That principal entails a system which, even when fully compromised (the situation in which the potential perpetrator gains full control over the system’s internals, code, and database), the maximum information disclosed are unrelated clusters of transactional data, while the individuals’ identities are practically untraceable.