Abstract — Patient-centered care is an emerging healthcare model that is changing how people think about health and about the patients themselves. It emphasizes the coordination and integration of care, and the use of appropriate information, communication, and education technologies in connecting patients, caregivers, physicians, nurses, and others into a healthcare team where the health system supports and encourages cooperation among team members. However, in spite of the widespread adoption of telemedicine, existing telemedicine applications do not support patient centered-care. In this paper, we present our designed cloud based telemedicine system that supports patient-centered care. It exploits Personal Health Records (PHRs) in sharing patient’s clinical documents, and it manages medical consultation requests by exploiting a Consultation ontology. The system and the PHRs may be located anywhere in the Internet, and its consulting organizations may include any healthcare provider having the ability for consultation.

Abstract — Patient-centered care is an emerging healthcare model that is changing how people think about health and about the patients themselves. It emphasizes the coordination and integration of care, and the use of appropriate information, communication, and education technologies in connecting patients, caregivers, physicians, nurses, and others into a healthcare team where the health system supports and encourages cooperation among team members. However, in spite of the widespread adoption of telemedicine, existing telemedicine applications neither support patient centered-care nor the interoperation of relevant e-health tools. In this paper we present a cloud-based telemedicine consultation server, which manages telemedicine consultation request and their allocation to consulting physicians. It also aids physicians to access patients ’ health documentation either through a Personal Health Record (PHR) or Personal Health Information System (PHIS). Although both ways are suitable for supporting patient centered telemedicine the PHIS is superior in that it integrates the functionalities of a variety of e-health tools, and thus provides a holistic approach for personal healthcare. However, the integration of e-health tools requires the introduction of a shared ontology and the transformation of patients ’ health records in the format that is compliant with the shared ontology.