Background

Given the increased mobility of patients and increased specialization of healthcare services, there is a greater need for efficient and secure transportation of electronic health records (EHR) across a multitude of hospitals and clinics. This is especially important for patients who have chronic diseases such as cancer because physicians will be able to provide smarter, safer, and more efficient care to them given their prior medical history. Currently, due to the privacy and high sensitivity of EHR, fax/mails are the main method of data sharing between hospitals/clinics. This results in major delays in patient care. Given this tedious data-sharing method, healthcare resources are also wasted in re‑examinations for information that was already known about the patient in a prior hospital/clinic. Therefore, there is a need for a method that allows good data privacy, security, efficiency, and access control of EHR data transfer.

Technology

This technology, known as Blockchain, uses a distributed ledger to provide a shared, immutable, and transparent history of the actions performed by all the participants of the network (patients, hospitals, clinics, etc). This allows for trust, accountability, and transparency to be established. Without a central point of control, Blockchain allows a user to have complete control of data and privacy which provides an opportunity to develop a secure EHR data management and sharing network. This blockchain‑based system will start by having hospitals provide a blockchain node integrated with its own EHR system and then form a whole network with all the data. Then, a web application will be used for patients and physicians to start sharing EHR; a hybrid data management approach is implemented where metadata on data sharing will be stored on the chain and the shared EHR data will be encrypted and stored off‑chain in a HIPAA-compliant online cloud. This allows the chain to have the protocol on how the data will be shared between patients and doctors, but once the data is shared, it is encrypted and stored somewhere else. The patients have 100% control of EHR sharing and it is securely encrypted for privacy.

Advantages

Permissioned blockchain technology allows for increased efficiency and security. - Highly scalable EHR data management due to the hybrid data management method. - Privacy protection via 2‑level encryption. - Patient-centric full access control.

Application

This technology is mainly going to be applied to EHR data management and HIPAA-sensitive patient data.