(c) 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.

There have been many socio-political and technological developments in the area of Electronic Patient Records (EPR). The technological aspects include EPR implemented using Online Transaction Processing (OTP) using Internet and Internet based systems, more recently via Cloud- Based systems (CBS) exploiting Cloud Service Models (CSM). Additionally, there are many socio-political considerations comprising: (1) political moves, including UK Government policy, which aims to deliver for patients 27/7 online access to their patient record, (2) considerations around ethical issues and informed permission and acceptance by the public and non-governmental organizations (NGO), (3) technological considerations about identification of suitable CBS and data structures in distributed systems characterized by unstructured data and, finally (4) sharing and collaboration as means of increasing efficiency, security, privacy, etc. In all, the aim is to provide professionals in medical domain with advanced platforms to not only access but also most importantly to share and collaborate at a wide scale level (e.g. National level). Addressing these aspects of EPR requires collaboration between all stakeholders in EPR, this paper considers these and concludes that such collaboration is essential if EPR are ever to become a reality.

Peer Reviewed