Effortless exchange of personal health records using near field communication

Personal health records (PHR) either resides in the hospital or resides with the patient in the form of paper-based records. When PHR is in the printed form it is bulky and inconvenient to carry by the user. Since smart phones has become ubiquitous and a necessity in day to day life, and most of them are equipped with contactless near field communication (NFC), we propose to exploit the inherent advantages of NFC or near field communication to transfer the personal health records from health care settings to patients smart phone and vice versa. This solution will make it convenient for the patient to carry the personal health records with them. This also achieve the quick access to PHR during medical emergencies, that ensures faster intervention. Also it will empower the patient to always carry his or her personal health records with them that come in handy during any medical emergencies. In this paper we prove that peer-to-peer mode in NFC that uses NFC and Bluetooth technologies can be leveraged for secure and seamless transfer of the personal health records from one healthcare network to another. We have analyzed and presented the advantages and disadvantages of this method and demonstrated the effectiveness of a novel method that uses NFC for sharing Personal Health records.