Abstract—P-Health, a future health model that can be described as a 6-P’s paradigm, aims to provide low cost and high quality health care via redesigning care practice and networking information systems at different levels. To realise p-Health, a multi-level health information system has to be developed for the processing, storage, transmission, acquisition and retrieval (P-STAR) of health information that spans multiple temporal and spatial scales and consists of multi-modality. This paper uses wearable devices, which have to be miniaturised, integrated, networked, digitalised, smart and standardised (MINDSS), as examples to illustrate how two or more P-STAR technologies are integrated together to implement a specific health care application under p-Health. In particular, standardisation of MINDSS devices that required a new measurement principle, such as the calibration procedure of cuff-less blood pressure measurement devices, is discussed. I. INTRODUCTION TO P-HEALTH -HEALTH, derived from the future heath model proposed by the U.S. National Institute of Health [1], can be described as a 6-P’s paradigm that aims to redesign care practice and connect personal, local, regional, national and global health information systems for lowering health care costs while enhancing the quality and efficiency of medical care and the response to widespread public health emergencies. As shown in Fig. 1, p-Health carries six intertwined components: personalised, pervasive, participatory, preventive, predictive and pre-emptive, forming two triangles that describe respectively “what kind of healthcare decisions should be made” and “how healthcare decisions should be made” [2], [3]. II. COST AND EFFICIENCY OF P-HEALTH The implementation of p-Health will lead to two desirable features: cost reduction and quality improvement in health care, which can be demonstrated in at least three different aspects. Firstly, under the current clinical model, diseases are often diagnosed and treated after the subject experienced Manuscript received April 23, 2010. This work was supported in part by the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF ), the 973 Project Fund (2010CB732606) and the Guangdong Innovation Team Fund in China. The authors are grateful to Standard Telecommunication Ltd., Jetfly Technology Ltd., Golden Meditech Company Ltd., Bird International Ltd., Bright Steps Corporation and PCCW for their supports to the ITF projects. C. C. Y. Poon (cpoon@ee.cuhk.edu.hk), W. B. Gu and Y. T. Zhang (phone: 852-2609-8459; e-mail: ytzhang@ee.cuhk.edu.hk) are with the Joint Research Centre for Biomedical Engineering, Dept. of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR. Y. T. Zhang is also with the Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China, and Key Laboratory for Biomedical Informatics and Health Engineering, CAS, China. symptoms of illnesses and seek medical consultation. If by then a disease has already developed to an end stage, health care can be relatively expensive and less effective, which partly leads to the substantial increased in health care expenditures at the few months before death [4]. In contrary, p-Health emphasises on preventing and predicting diseases as well as providing pre-emptive treatments to diseases before the emergence of disease symptoms, when there is a higher chance of restoring health conditions. By redesigning care practice, the p-Health model hopes to increase not only life expectancy but more importantly healthy life years of an individual. Secondly, low cost health care is to be achieved by personalisation. Preventive strategies, as outlined by Geoffrey Rose in his classical seminal paper “Sick Individuals and Sick Populations”, will have two different approaches: the individual or high-risk approach and the population approach [5]. While there are many arguments in favour of the population approach, cost of it can be high because of the size of the target group. Therefore, a low cost approach should aim for optimising the total costs spent on screening and predicting risks of individuals for developing a disease and the corresponding therapies and treatments required for the individual. By narrowing down the target group to a smaller population or eventually to specific individuals, the total cost of health care expenditures can be reduced as a whole. Thirdly, unnecessary and/or duplicated health services are eliminated by ensuring different authorised parties will have access to the health information and that multiple parties are involved in the decision making process. This participatory health model requires integrating health information systems at different levels, from personal, institutional to national and eventually global level. Health Informatics for Low-Cost and High-Quality Health Care Carmen C. Y. Poon, Wenbo Gu, and Y. T. Zhang, Fellow, IEEE P Preventive Personalised Participatory Predictive Pre-emptive Pervasive What kind of healthcare decisions should be made How healthcare decisions should be made Fig. 1. The future p-Health model: a 6-P’s paradigm [2], [3]. 32nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 31 - September 4, 2010 978-1-4244-4124-2/10/$25.00 ©2010 IEEE 1755