towards large-scale sharing of electronic health records of cancer patients
The rising cost of healthcare is one of the major concerns faced by the nation. One way to lower healthcare costs and provide better quality care to patients is through the effective use of Information Technology (IT). Data sharing and collaboration and large-scale management of healthcare data have been identified as important IT challenges to advance the nation's healthcare system. In this paper, we present an overview of the software framework called CDN (Collaborative Data Network) that we are developing for large-scale sharing of electronic health records (EHR). In this on-going effort, we focus on sharing EHRs of cancer patients. Cancer is the second leading cause of deaths in the US. CDN is based on the synergistic combination of peer-to-peer technology and the extensible markup language XML and XQuery. We outline the key challenges that arise when sharing evolving, heterogeneous repositories and processing queries across multiple repositories. We present the novel architecture of CDN to overcome these challenges and discuss our plan for implementation, evaluation, and deployment.
cancer ehr xml xquery p2p