The Personal Health Library: A Single Point of Secure Access to Patient Digital Health Information

Traditionally, health data management has been EMR-based and mostly handled by health care providers. Mechanisms are needed to give patients more control over their health conditions. Personal Health Libraries (PHLs) provide a single point of secure access to patients' digital health information that can help empower patients to make better-informed decisions about their health care. This paper reports a work-in-progress on leveraging tools and methods from artificial intelligence and knowledge representation to build a private, decentralized PHL that supports interoperability and, ultimately, true care integration. We demonstrate how a social application querying such a decentralized PHL can deliver a tailored push notification intervention focused on improving self-care behaviors in diabetic adults from medically underserved communities.