ABSTRACT
The manual approach to patient health record-keeping is not only inefficient, time-consuming and prone to errors, but also implies redundancy and lacks formal audit trails. The inefficiencies of paper-based health records have led many healthcare providers, mostly in developed countries, to develop electronic systems for collecting, managing and storing their patient health data. Due to the costs involved in developing a full-fledged electronic health record (EHR) system, the time taken to recruit software engineers and train staff on how to use the software, many healthcare providers are still using paper-based methods. This work describes the design of a secured and interoperable multi-tenant SaaS-EHR system comprising multiple tenants, software applications hosted in the cloud, databases and external applications. The software applications consist of the tenant identifier, security layer, customization/extension point, business layer and service layer. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL were used for implementation. The security layers were built on seven pillars. The system is efficient, effective, secured, robust, required less time to set up, and provides easy access to patient data on demand at high speed and reduced cost. Patient health records can be shared among various healthcare providers, and the system ensures strong isolation of data as each tenant has their own separate databases.
