P2Care: A dynamic peer-to-peer network for collaboration in personalized healthcare service delivery

In the healthcare domain, the quality of personalized service delivery is strongly tied with collaboration among multiple stakeholders for accurate and reliable access to a variety of distributed and heterogeneous information and services. Existing healthcare information systems lack collaboration since they offer limited accessibility to resources and pose many restrictions in terms of scalability and flexibility. In this work, we propose P2Care, a decentralized, dynamic, scalable and self-organized network that exploits the functionalities of the structured peer-to-peer networks in order to provide collaboration. P2Care provides efficient ubiquitous access to medical information by organizing participating entities into groups according to common characteristics and interests. It incorporates enhanced lookup mechanisms with low response time and signaling overhead. The performance of the P2Care system has been evaluated through simulations. A prototype application demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed system for cooperation and collaboration in order to facilitate personalized service delivery.