A Holistic Approach for Prevention and Early Diagnostics :Personal Health Management with Web-based Personal Health Records

Prevention and early diagnostics are actual topics in today's healthcare. A structured and integrated approach is desired to optimize and benefit from preventive healthcare. We envision personal health records (PHRs) to be a platform for personal health services. The current PHRs, however, mainly provide services that are focussed on cost reduction and management of specific diseases. Integrated prevention and early diagnostics approach is currently not a part of PHRs, whereas an expansion with such a service is desired to create a direct value proposition for health consumers. PHR-based services thus need to focus on prevention, early diagnostics and subsequent early intervention, next to disease management. In this paper we propose a holistic approach for preventive health services via PHRs and identify the issues related to this approach.