. One of the agreed key requirements for share ability of the EHR is to break the nexus between the HER and the EHR system [4]. The MyPHRMachines architecture clearly separates PHR data from the software to work with this data. This paper demonstrates how this creates novel opportunities for market of PHR software services without compromising patient privacy.
Commercial PHR systems positioning themselves within the cloud computing paradigm are emerging. For example, SeeMyRadiology [6] enables patients to upload their medical images and then selectively share these with caregivers. Unfortunately, such so-called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) systems are typically (1) specialized for one medical function and (2)specifically programmed for web browsers. The SeeMyRadiology example indeed consists of a DICOM viewer that has been programmed in HTML 5 and related technologies.MyPHRMachines is an academic prototype that is more generally applicable since it exposes to its users the socalled Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) tier of cloud architectures [7]. In a nutshell, the system provides infrastructure to (1) store and share (subsets of) patient data and (2) deploy and use specialized software in remote Virtual Machines (VMs).
MyPHRMachines allows patients to build personal health records which are robust across the space and time dimensions:
Space.Patients relocating or simply traveling across different countries during their lifetime will always
be able to reproduce their original health records
and the software required to analyze/visualize those.
This is often currently not possible because of
the high functional and architectural heterogeneity
of health care information systems across different
countries/states [8].