With the introduction of services like Microsoft Health vault and Google health, it is becoming increasingly easy for individuals to add, share, and manage their personal health information online.

Consumer health platforms are increasingly popular for their easy integration, and the security and management they provide to individuals who want to maintain their personal health records online.

Consumer health platforms provide the facility with storing individual centric health information. These platforms have significant capability to provide interoperability with clinical systems. Given the increasing importance of medical imaging in health care, it will be critical for these platforms to store medical imaging information of individuals as a part of their healthcare records.

Nevertheless, the large size of digital imaging data is likely to be a hindrance. This paper discusses an approach which can be used to store key images, and to provide access to large image datasets using a combination of consumer health platforms and XDSi framework.

Consumer health platforms will need to store patient medical imaging information, but will be constrained due to large file sizes. These constraints are due to bandwidth limitations, as well as the ability of the platform to share massive amount of information. The size of a typical CT scan study will be a few hundred megabytes.

When it comes to storing medical imaging datasets on a consumer health platform, the primary challenges are going to be the following:

• Security: As with all medical records, due to their sensitive and personal nature the data that will be stored on consumer health platforms, the services have placed a significant focus on data security. This is done by providing an authentication mechanism that allows record owners to share information with specified entities. Transmission of patient data is also secured, to ensure that the information is kept confidential while being sent to the browser. Also, security measures are constantly updated and revised, according to industry trends.

• Large amounts of data transmission: Imaging modalities churn out massive amounts of imaging data. With the advent of newer technologies (e.g., 64-slice CT scanners), the total size of data per study has increased and will continue to do so. Online consumer health platforms have a limited amount of storage and bandwidth availability. While they might be capable of storing different types of health related data, the sheer volume of image datasets will be quite large to transmit and store.

Bandwidth usage is also a challenge, given the number of users accessing the health platform at one time.

One approach that can be evaluated is to share relevant “key” data on consumer health platforms and, if required, provide access to extended imaging datasets. This paper tries to demonstrate this approach with a combination of online consumer health platforms and the IHE XDSi framework.

Getting key data online:

The first step is to provide the key data to the online consumer health platform. After imaging procedures have finished, related study data, which can be documents like key images, reporting notes, DICOM structure reports, or diagnostic reports, can be uploaded to the consumer health platform.

Also included with this data is information which will help in acquiring extended imaging data from the source. This can be in the form of a URL to an XDSi source with specific information on the imaging study (e.g., Patient ID, study UID etc). This information can be integrated as secure http link (HTTPS URL) that triggers authentication events at the XDSi source.

Accessing the extended data:

The key data is now part the individuals health information. It can be accessed by other providers when the individual authorizers them to view it.

During the course of care delivery, providers can look up key data as needed and when required. In case the provider needs access to the extended imaging study, it can request the XDSi source by sending the authentication request mentioned in the record.

The XDSi source can then request the individual to authorize the transmission of his study data to the providers imaging document consumer. This mechanism can easily be implemented via email, as most consumer health platforms have an email address linked to the user.

Once the authorization is received, the XDSi source can then provide access to extended data for a specific duration. This ensures that the data is available for a limited period.

The methodology outlined above can be effectively used: to utilize the features of consumer health platforms; to provide access to key imaging data; and, if required, to provide a link to the extended imaging data.

While on a technical level, the focus can be to aggregate the functionality of individual consumer health platforms and provide a single set of application calls (API’s) that work across them. This effort can be reduced considerably if consumer health platforms voluntarily take the initiative to provide standardized integration details for incorporating key Images and XDSi access information.

On the XDSi side, a simpler system could be defined for making the Patient Identity source work in conjunction with the identification system provided by the consumer health platform.

As consumer health platforms evolve and their popularity increases, the need for sharing medical imaging data will become imperative. The methodology outlined above can be beneficial to a host of imaging vendors like PACS, RIS, and workstation providers.

It can also be extended further to provide support for a host of records that may be too large to transmit or store, or are not easily supported by the consumer health platforms services.