Abstract
Health Information Exchange (HIE) allows healthcare providers and citizens, to access and securely share healthcare information electronically, improving the speed, quality, safety, and cost of patient care. Exchange of this information can be achieved through a wired or wireless way, at close or long distances, achieving different goals in terms of transmission speed, exchange reliability and data transfer security. While HIE cannot replace provider-patient communication, it can greatly improve the completeness of patients’ records. Most of the current research is devoted on exchanging health information among healthcare organizations, without giving the ability to the citizens on exchanging healthcare data with healthcare organizations and be able to manipulate this data, mainly due to lack of standardization and security guarantees. Towards the goal of HIE, and the ability of citizens to have access to their healthcare data, in this paper two different wireless communication protocols (Remote-to-Device (R2D) and Device-to-Device (D2D)) are specified that can be used by software applications. The goal of the R2D protocol is to facilitate the acquirement of healthcare data of a citizen from an Electronic Health Record (EHR) through internet connection, while the D2D protocol aims on facilitating the exchange of this health data among citizens and healthcare professionals, on top of Bluetooth