User-Centric Health Data Using Self-sovereign Identities

TL;DR

This paper explores how Self-Sovereign Identities combined with Distributed Ledger Technologies can enhance privacy and user control over health data, proposing a blockchain-based architecture aligned with health use cases.

Contribution

It maps SSI concepts to health domain roles, aligns SSI interactions with US health use cases, and presents a blockchain architecture for user-centric health data management.

Findings

Mapped SSI concepts to health domain roles.

Aligned SSI interactions with US health use cases.

Proposed a blockchain-based architecture for health data.

Abstract

This article presents the potential use of the Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI), combining with Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), to improve the privacy and control of health data. The paper presents the SSI technology, lists the prominent use cases of decentralized identities in the health area, and discusses an effective blockchain-based architecture. The main contributions of the article are: (i) mapping SSI general and abstract concepts, e.g., issuers and holders, to the health domain concepts, e.g., physicians and patients; (ii) creating a correspondence between the SSI interactions, e.g., issue and verify a credential, and the US standardized set of health use cases; (iii) presenting and instantiating an architecture to deal with the use cases mentioned, effectively organizing the data in a user-centric way, that uses well-known SSI and Blockchain technologies.