Personal Health Trajectory Traceability using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Healthcare delivery transformations and the use of connected health devices are paving the way to a paradigm shift from current healthcare systems towards patient-centered systems. Many proposals successfully reorient health information systems so that data are still distributed among the institutions and services that generate them, while being accessed jointly from a single point of view per patient. However, this means that control over the operations involving this data is lost. Mechanisms to maintain the traceability of health data are needed. This will enable the verification of the integrity of the records and will provide assurances that they have not been compromised. This problem has already been addressed in other domains such as food supply chains, where traceability allows to know all interactions with a food supply from the time it is produced until it is consumed. This paper proposes a blockchain solution to achieve the traceability of health data in patient-centered distributed environments. To validate this proposal, a case study involving 50 sociosanitary institutions in Portugal have been chosen. Different performance tests have been conducted to demonstrate the suitability, feasibility and scalability of our proposal.