Indivo: a personally controlled health record for health information exchange and communication

Kenneth D Mandl¹^,2 , William W Simons¹ , William CR Crawford¹^,2 and Jonathan M Abbett¹

¹Children's Hospital Informatics Program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Boston, MA, USA

²Center for Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2007, 7:25doi:10.1186/1472-6947-7-25


Published:	12 September 2007

Abstract

Background

Personally controlled health records (PCHRs), a subset of personal health records (PHRs), enable a patient to assemble, maintain and manage a secure copy of his or her medical data. Indivo (formerly PING) is an open source, open standards PCHR with an open application programming interface (API).

Results

We describe how the PCHR platform can provide standard building blocks for networked PHR applications. Indivo allows the ready integration of diverse sources of medical data under a patient's control through the use of standards-based communication protocols and APIs for connecting PCHRs to existing and future health information systems.

Conclusion

The strict and transparent personal control model is designed to encourage widespread participation by patients, healthcare providers and institutions, thus creating the ecosystem for development of innovative, consumer-focused healthcare applications.