Personalized Medical Care

A growing subset of EHRs, personal health records (PHRs) opens up the possibility of engaging patients in their care, as well as new opportunities for participatory research and personalized medicine. Organizations nationwide, from providers to employers, are already investing heavily in PHR systems. Additionally, the explosive use of online social networking sites and mobile technologies will undoubtedly play a role in future research efforts by making available a veritable flood of information, such as real-time exercise monitoring and other fitness inputs, to health researchers.
The rich database that will become available for the clinicians and researchers will provide directions in many a discipline related to diseases, epidemics, vaccines, chronic illnesses, cancers and so on from a statistical perspective. Patterns will become visible as apparently disparate data sets become collated and analyzed by bioinformatics scientists. This would not have been possible had there not been an impetus for the conversion to electronic archiving, coding of diseases, electronic workflow achieved through interoperable protocols in information technology.