QRM: A QR-code based mHealth information system for patient-centered care

With emerging new technologies and growing interests in patient-centered healthcare, the role of patients in healthcare is shifting from a passive recipient of care to an active information seeker and collaborator. It becomes crucial to provide patients with ubiquitous, secure access to their electronic health records (EHR) and personalized healthcare services such as patient education. Such capabilities are highly limited in most existing healthcare IT systems. The researchers in this study designed, developed, and evaluated an mHealth information system that enables patients or authorized others to access patients' EHR, to navigate personalized patient education material, and to view patients' emergency contact information in case of an emergency through their mobile phones at anywhere and anytime while addressing patient identification and data privacy problems through a QR-code based patient identification mechanism. The results of a user evaluation study reveal that participants generally favor the proposed system and report a high level of perceived usefulness and intention to use the system.