Leveraging Technology for Healthcare and Retaining Access to Personal Health Data to Enhance Personal Health and Well-being

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of secure, standardized, and portable electronic health records, proposing a blockchain-based system to facilitate cross-border sharing while addressing ethical and technical challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a blockchain-based EHR system to improve security and portability of health data across borders, addressing current infrastructural and standardization issues.

Findings

Demonstrated the difficulty of medical record portability through case studies.

Proposed a blockchain-based solution for secure cross-border health data sharing.

Discussed ethical and technical challenges of implementing such a system.

Abstract

Health data is a sensitive category of personal data. It might result in a high risk to individual and health information handling rights and opportunities unless there is a palatable defense. Reasonable security standards are needed to protect electronic health records (EHR). All personal data handling needs adequate explanation. Maintaining access to medical data even in the developing world would favor health and well-being across the world. Unfortunately, there are still countries that hinder the portability of medical records. Numerous occurrences have shown that it still takes weeks for the medical data to be ported from one general physician (GP) to another. Cross border portability is nearly impossible due to the lack of technical infrastructure and standardization. We demonstrate the difficulty of the portability of medical records with some example case studies as a collaborative engagement exercise through a data mapping process to describe how different people and datapoints interact and evaluate EHR portability techniques. We then propose a blockchain-based EHR system that allows secure, and cross border sharing of medical data. The ethical and technical challenges around having such a system have also been discussed in this study.