Healthcare Data Management by Using Blockchain Technology

Electronic healthcare solutions permit interconnecting hospitals and clinics to enable sharing of electronic medical records according to interoperability and legal standards. However, healthcare record data is siloed across hospitals and data sharing processes are unsuccessful in providing accountable audit of the data. Blockchain technology has been successfully applied to support the management of distributed data. Its decentralisation and immutability features can underpin the development of next-generation services for health data sharing. This chapter positions recent blockchain research outcomes within the healthcare legal and technical standard frameworks (e.g. IHE and FHIR). It then presents how blockchain can be applied to healthcare data sharing practices in order to enhance trust with automated provenance tracking and accountable credential verification. The data sharing practices related to international organ transplant processes are used as motivating and application case study.