Medical record: systematic centralization versus secure on demand aggregation

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Medical Record Management
• Data Security

Background:

• Patient medical histories are often fragmented across multiple healthcare institutions.
• Accessing scattered patient data presents significant challenges for healthcare providers.
• Existing centralized systems face issues with standardization, privacy, and security.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a pragmatic and secure on-demand system for gathering patient medical history data.
• To enable secure retrieval of scattered health information for medical professionals.
• To address the limitations of centralized medical record systems.

Main Methods:

• Proposed an alternative approach using an on-demand system with a specialized search engine.
• Utilized data 'as is' without requiring standardization or centralization.
• Implemented pseudonymized patient identities to ensure privacy.

Main Results:

• Developed Medical Record Search Engines (MRSE) to retrieve patient information from various hospitals.
• MRSEs provide requested information to healthcare professionals using pseudonymized data.
• The system bypasses many difficulties of centralized architectures but requires professional data validation.

Conclusions:

• An on-demand system for gathering patient information is highly beneficial.
• This low-cost, pragmatic alternative to centralized records can be developed quickly.
• The system offers potential for future enhancements and should be considered by health authorities.