SIGMCC: A system for sharing meta patient records in a Peer-to-Peer environment

This paper considers the interoperability and information sharing between health care providers. It proposes a distributed Peer-to-Peer (P2P) based framework that enables health operators of different hospitals to share and aggregate clinical information about patients and therapy effects. Patient records are mapped into a simple XML-based meta-Electronic Patient Record (meta-EPR). The meta-EPR is not a standard EPR proposal, but it is a lightweight data structure defined to contain relevant and aggregate information extracted from the different EPRs adopted by each hospital. Hospital operators formulate queries against meta-EPR schema; queries are then distributed to the connected hospitals hosting meta-EPR instances, through a P2P infrastructure. The presented framework has been fully implemented in a system called SIGMCC, which offers an Application Programming Interface (API) for query formulation, data loading and updating. As a case study, an application of the proposed meta-EPR to the cancer medical domain has been developed. Finally, SIGMCC implements a view mechanism to allow personal (patient) information protection against unauthorized users.