Open issues in intelligent personal health record--an updated status report for 2012

To improve the capability and usability of the personal health record (PHR) as a tool to empower consumers in the management of their own health, we have proposed the concept of an intelligent PHR (iPHR) and built a prototype iPHR system with four functions. These four functions use various health knowledge and computer science techniques to automatically provide users with personalized healthcare information to facilitate their well-being. This paper discusses several open issues in iPHR, including two enhancements to an existing function and two potential new functions. The two enhancements are for automatically compiling relevant self-care activities for each health issue and automatically identifying contraindicated self-care activities, respectively. One potential new function is personalized search for individual healthcare providers. Another potential new function is personalized local search for health-related services to help maintain patients in their homes. We include some preliminary thoughts on how to address these open issues with the hope to stimulate future research work on iPHR.