Multimedia Health Records: user-centered design approach for a multimedia uploading service

Multimedia elements add value to text documents by transmitting information difficult to express in words. In healthcare, many professional and services keep this elements in their own repositories. This brings the problem of information fragmentation in different silos which hinder its access to other healthcare professionals. On the other hand patients have clinical data of their own in different formats generated in different healthcare organizations which is not accessible to professionals within our healthcare network. This paper describes the design, development and implementation processes of a service which allows media elements to be loaded in a patient clinical data repository (CDR) either through an electronic health record by professionals (EHR) or through a personal health record (PHR) by patients, in order to avoid fragmentation of the information.