Design for a patient-centric medical information system using XML web services

Patients' medical information is dispersed on several providers' medical information systems making personal medical information management a difficult task for patients. Given this situation, there is a need for patients to be able to easily access their patient data from the different providers 'systems so as to promote effective management of their medical information. The main objective of this work is to propose a design for a system that will alleviate the personal health information management process for patients by providing them a single point of access to their medical information from disparate healthcare providers' systems over the Internet. The proposed design for this system is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) web services. An evaluation of a prototype shows that the design allows patients an easy means of managing their health information and the design is also scalable, extensible, secure and interoperable with disparate healthcare providers' information systems.