Development and Evaluation of a Web-Based Personal Electronic Health Record (pEHR)

Abstract

The objective of personal Electronic Health Record (pEHR) project was to investigate the deployment of an advanced web-based electronic health record service, tailored to the needs of the average European citizen while providing to healthcare professionals the means and the IT tools that will help them to be more effective in daily clinical routine. In this study, a web-based service that authenticates users, provides the personal electronic health record application and enables users to access and/or update their own medical information was developed. The system was evaluated across three different patient groups involving a total of 150 patients suffering from congenital heart disease, Parkinson’s disease and diabetes that were recruited from three different European hospitals. The results indicated the pEHR service to be an effective medium for the storage and management of data by different patient groups. Overall, the three patient groups and healthcare professionals considered the service to have comprehensive and valuable content, to be secure and user-friendly and to have a potential for further improvements while they preferred it to be sponsored free.