A Distributed Collaborative Platform for Personal Health Profiles in Patient-Driven Health Social Network

Health social networks (HSNs) have become an integral part of healthcare to augment the ability of people to communicate, collaborate, and share information in the healthcare domain despite obstacles of geography and time. Doctors disseminate relevant medical updates in these platforms and patients take into account opinions of strangers when making medical decisions. This paper introduces our efforts to develop a core platform called Distributed Platform for Health Profiles (DPHP) that enables individuals or groups to control their personal health profiles. DPHP stores user's personal health profiles in a non-proprietary manner which will enable healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies to reuse these profiles in parallel in order to maximize the effort where users benefit from each usage for their personal health profiles. DPHP also facilitates the selection of appropriate data aggregators and assessing their offered datasets in an autonomous way. Experimental results were described to demonstrate the proposed search model in DPHP. Multiple advantages might arise when healthcare providers utilize DPHP to collect data for various data analysis techniques in order to improve the clinical diagnosis and the efficiency measurement for some medications in treating certain diseases.