3 Supporting Chronic Disease Care Quality: Design and Implementation of a Health Service and Its Integration with Electronic Health Records ALI SUNYAEV, University of Cologne, Germany DMITRY CHORNYI, Technische Universit¨ at M ¨ unchen, Germany Chronic medical conditions take a huge toll on lives of a growing number of people and are a major contribu- tor to the rising costs in healthcare. As patients are increasingly willing to take an active part in managing their conditions, chronic disease self-management programs and information systems that support them are recognized for their potential to improve the quality of healthcare delivery. These programs often rely on recording longitudinal patient data and analyzing it. Therefore, maintaining appropriate data quality is important for self-management programs to be efficient and safe. We designed and implemented a prototype of a health self-management service for chronically ill people. It is a distributed application that supports patients with diabetes at tracking their blood glucose levels. The main design goals were usability, extensibil- ity, security, and interoperability. The system integrates with the Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health personal health record platforms. It utilizes industry-strength storage and security mechanisms, is scalable, and as a result, can be used to gather, securely store, and analyze patient data over long periods of time. In this article we examine how software information technology can support chronic disease self-management and its impact on the quality of patient data. Furthermore, we describe the requirements that drove the system’s development, its architecture, and design decisions. Categories and Subject Descriptors: J.3 [Life and Medical Sciences]: Medical information systems, health; H.3.5 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Online Information Services—Data sharing, Web-based ser- vices; D.2.11 [Software Engineering]: Software Architectures; D.2.12 [Software Engineering]: Interop- erability General Terms: Design, Documentation, Management Additional Key Words and Phrases: Data quality, chronic disease management, personal health records, health management system ACM Reference Format: Sunyaev, A. and Chornyi, D. 2012. Supporting chronic disease care quality: Design and implementation of a health service and its integration with electronic health records. ACM J. Data Inf. Qual. 3, 2, Article 3 (May 2012), 21 pages. DOI = 10.1145/2184442.2184443 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2184442.2184443 1. INTRODUCTION In healthcare, several medical scenarios require systematic collection of longitudinal patient data. Physicians make diagnoses by gathering information about the patient and evaluating it. In the great majority of cases, a patient’s case history is the most important and the most revealing portion of the database [Cutler 1998]. For instance, Author’s address: Ali Sunyaev, Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Cologne, Germany; email: sunyaev@wiso.uni-koeln.de. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c  2012 ACM 1936-1955/2012/05-ART3 $10.00 DOI 10.1145/2184442.2184443 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2184442.2184443 ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality, Vol. 3, No. 2, Article 3, Publication date: May 2012.