Achieving scalability in a distributed electronic health record system

With the rapid development of information technology, traditional health care is evolving towards a more digital and electronic stage. Electronic Health Record (EHR) deals with basic information and health care related information of residents and it conforms to the relevant standards. It is not only able to provide useful information to medical workers, but also has the ability to exchange resources with other health related information systems. To support this massive data exchange in electronic health record system, scalability is a prerequisite when designing and implementing the system. However with the growing complexity of electronic health record data sources, it has proven to be a significant challenge to set up a structure which allows a massive data exchange involving a large number of concurrent users. Of even greater importance is to determine a method to ensure data security while maintaining a high performance. In this paper, we have proposed scalability oriented distributed electronic health record system in order to address this problem. Health related data is gathered by sensors before being uploaded into the system. A distributed server group was designed to handle and process concurrent data exchange within the system. A load balance algorithm has also been designed and implemented in addition to crash detection mechanisms in order to improve both the scalability and performance of the system. Data security and heterogeneous data source compatibility are also ensured by middleware. The power efficiency of the mobile health data collector is also taken into consideration. The test results and evaluation of the system demonstrated that the distributed electronic health record system's performance scales well relation to test scenarios. Middleware for data exchange also displayed the characteristics of secure, flexible and high performance.