Personal Health Records: New Means to Safely Handle our Health Data?

Personal Health Records offer users the possibility of managing their own health data. Moreover, most users of these applications, like patients and doctors, have an increasing interest in using personal health records, to improve healthcare costs, quality, and efficiency. However, several issues related to PHRs might make users reluctant to use PHRs. On the other hand, PHRs offer cloud services so that application designers to create applications around PHRs, thus saving costs and effort. Furthermore, PHRs can be connected through social networks, therefore permitting communication between patients and physicians. This paper shows some of these issues, specially, security and privacy issues for indicating to designers what they should take into account. Other issues related to cloud services, social networks and reasoning techniques are also dealt to show new emerging line of research.