Blockchains' federation for integrating distributed health data using a patient-centered approach

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain federation approach to integrate and share patient health data across systems, enabling a comprehensive, patient-centered view of health information while addressing data privacy and accessibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blockchain federation model for secure, patient-controlled health data sharing and demonstrates its implementation in a practical scenario.

Findings

Successful implementation of blockchain federation for health data integration

Enhanced access to comprehensive patient health information

Potential for improved patient-centered healthcare systems

Abstract

Today's world is a globalized and connected one, where people are increasingly moving around and interacting with a greater number of services and devices of all kinds, including those that allow them to monitor their health. However, each company, institution or health system usually store its patients' data in an isolated way. Although this approach can have some benefits related with privacy, security, etc., it also implies that each one of them generates different, incomplete and possibly contradictory views of a patient's health data, losing part of the value that this information could bring to the patient. That is the reason why researchers from all over the world are determined to replace the current institution-centered health systems with new patient-centered ones. In these new systems, all the health information of a patient is integrated into a unique global vision. However, some questions are still unanswered. Specifically, who should store and maintain the information of a given patient and how should this information be made available for other systems. To address this situation, this work proposes a new solution towards making the Personal Health Trajectory of patients available for both, the patients themselves and health institutions. By using the concept of blockchains' federation and web services access to the global vision of a person health can be granted to existing and new solutions. To demonstrate the viability of the proposal, an implementation is provided alongside the obtained results in a potential scenario.