Towards web-assisted self-care in developing countries: A challenge for health posts and pharmacies

Developing countries have very high patients-per-doctor ratios. Therefore, analysing the adaptability of self-care for developing countries is of prime importance. We have investigated how health posts and pharmacies could promote self-care in developing countries. We have restricted ourselves on the ways these organizations could assist patients in exploiting health-oriented network services such as Personal Health Records (PHRs) and public medical data sources. Our ultimate goal is to promote information therapy (Ix) as it aims to prescribe the right information to right people at right time. In our solution, Ix is carried out by a SPARQL engine, which is capable for accessing PHRs and other medical data sources within a query. Thus we can augment patient's data in PHR by external data sources. Such automatic augmentation is based on the overlapping ontologies that model PHRs' data as well the data in public medical data sources.