International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Information Systems Research, June 18-20, 2014, Taipei, Taiwan 1 DESIGN OF A PERSONAL HEALTH BOOK FOR ENSURING HEALTHCARE DATA PORTABILITY Seddiq Alabbasi, Ashir Ahmed, Andrew Rebeiro-Hargrave, Kunihiko Kaneko and Akira Fukuda Kyushu University, Japan seddiq@f.ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp, ashir@ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp, andrew@f.ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp, kaneko@ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp, fukuda@ait.kyushu-u.ac.jp ABSTRACT Electronic Health Records (EHR) are digitized and stored for efficient patient management in hospitals or clinics. At the patient side, the health records are not digitally stored and thus difficult to manage. In this work, we propose a new framework, we call it Personal Health Book (PHB) where a patient can own, operate, manage by herself and can also share her own data with other authorized parties. We are investigating what database design would be suitable for PHB. We considered three different database designs (wide direction, long direction and decomposed) and compared their performances. We set up a simulator and measured performance indicators to compare their performances. We observed that decomposed design has more advantage than the other two. Decompose design itself will help in managing data types along with the better results we got in a simulation we designed to compare long direction versus decomposed. Keyword: Personal Health Book (PHB), Electronic Health Records (EHR), Database design, Personal Healthcare data, Long Direction, Wide Direction, Decomposed 1. INTRODUCTION Electronic Health Records (EHR) are digitized and stored for efficient patient management in hospitals or clinics[7]. At the patient side, the health records are not digitally stored. They receive their records in printed papers. Printer papers are easy to read because we don’t any extra device. However, it is difficult for a patient to search from past records or know the medical statistics. When a patient moves from one place to another, the digitized past health records do not move with the patient. Because the digitized data belong to the hospitals and the patient do not have digital access to them. Past effort produced medical record templates, medical information messaging protocols, but they are only limited into communicating between organizations. Not all the hospitals are following standards and therefore, data exchange between hospitals is not an easy task. One way to solve this issue is to introduce a middleware. As there are several standards, we need multiple middleware that is not a cost-effective solution. We are interesting in looking at the patients’ viewpoint. How a patient can digitally access to her past medical records, how can she search/manage her records and more importantly how can she share her past records with another physician for a better