Personal Health Data Integration and Intelligence through Semantic Web and Blockchain Technologies

TL;DR

This paper proposes a scalable system combining semantic web and blockchain technologies to facilitate secure, standardized, and decentralized integration of personal health data from various devices for improved healthcare insights.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework that leverages FHIR standards, semantic web, and blockchain to address data integration and security challenges in personal health data ecosystems.

Findings

Provides a FHIR-compliant semantic web data template

Implements smart contracts for secure data sharing

Enables real-time insights from personal health devices

Abstract

Data integration among various stakeholders in the healthcare space remains a challenge, despite the impressive advances in Health AI in the past decade. There is a lot of ``messy'' non-standard but structured data that are continually being collected from personal health devices. While efforts such as the Fast Healthcare Interoperability of Resources (FHIR) are underway in standardizing the data representation formats, there is currently a gap in the standard in addressing the health data ecosystem's decentralized nature. As we see explosive growth in chronic diseases such as diabetes, healthcare providers need Observations of Daily Living (ODL) of their patients to treat them effectively. The best way to obtain ODL is through personal health devices. However, such devices are manufactured by various device makers, and they may not follow standards or integrate with existing Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. It is also imperative that any data sharing that happens will occur in a secure and trustworthy environment, without being too restrictive, i.e., tied to a particular EHR vendor. This paper presents a scalable solution to bridge this gap using a system that implements semantic web and blockchain technologies. Our solution uses FHIR compliant semantic web based data templates in conjunction with smart contracts on the blockchain to provide healthcare providers with insights on their patients' daily activity that cannot be readily determined solely through patient encounters at the clinic.