Approach to Services Using Personal Health Records (PHRs)

Due to an aging society and the increase of the average life expectancy in recent years, a common hope for people is to enjoy their lives at an old age instead of being unhealthy. Nevertheless, the rate of lifestyle disease patients over the age of 40 is significantly high and the large expense of the health-care system contribution for the elderly is a significant portion of the total medical care expenses of the entire nation. To tackle this problem, preventive healthcare that uses personal health records (PHRs) has been studied carefully in the pursuit of a solution. However, PHR data is scattered in various places nowadays: diagnostic information is managed at medical institutions, medical examination information at medical examination institutions or insurers (corporate health insurance associations, etc.), exercise information at fitness clubs and certain personal information such as weight at home. For this reason, it is important to gather those kinds of PHR data and provide them as IT solutions so that the PHR data is available anytime, anywhere and on any terminal. Fujitsu has been working to develop such a healthcare platform system, which gathers and utilizes PHR data, as a cloud service. Currently it is at a feasibility study phase to validate the service's effectiveness, by means of running its prototype system with trial users who are Fujitsu employees. This paper outlines the trial project and describes Fujitsu's approach to deliver the PHR-based healthcare services platform.