As well as the ability of providers to access the records of their patients, it also ideally enables patients themselves to keep track of health-related data. EMR allows the government and other watchdog groups to determine if there are patterns of socioeconomic, racial, and geographic, discrimination in the delivery of health services (Layman 2008: 165)
With the technological advancements in information technology, cloud computing provides several opportunities and services to users like storing personal information, accessing various web services for online transactions, online diagnosis systems etc. (Kumar, Babu, Ramesh, Madhura, & Padmavathamma, 2013)
Gaining access to healthcare data is a vital requirement for medical practitioners and pharmaceutical researchers to study characteristics of diseases. In recent years, the proliferation of cloud computing services enables hospitals and institutions to transit their healthcare data to the cloud, which provides ubiquitous data access and on-demand high quality services at a low cost (Lin, Dou, Zhou, & Lui, 2015)
For example, self-caring services are becoming more and more important for our daily life, especially under the urgent situation of global aging. Big data such as massive historical medical records makes it possible for users to have self-caring services, such as to get diagnosis by themselves with similar patients' records (Wang, Chen, & Zhang, 2015)