FHIRChain: Applying Blockchain to Securely and Scalably Share Clinical Data

By Peng Zhang, Jules White, Douglas C. Schmidt, Gunther Lenz, S. Rosenbloom. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, 2018

683 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Secure and scalable data sharing is essential for collaborative clinical decision making. Conventional clinical data efforts are often siloed, however, which creates barriers to efficient information exchange and impedes effective treatment decision made for patients. This paper provides four contributions to the study of applying blockchain technology to clinical data sharing in the context of technical requirements defined in the “Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap” from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). First, we analyze the ONC requirements and their implications for blockchain-based systems. Second, we present FHIRChain, which is a blockchain-based architecture designed to meet ONC requirements by encapsulating the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard for shared clinical data. Third, we demonstrate a FHIRChain-based decentralized app using digital health identities to authenticate participants in a case study of collaborative decision making for remote cancer care. Fourth, we highlight key lessons learned from our case study.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Health Information Management, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/493897a42c53209994787eea20c34f700e1bba63

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Citations in the corpus

Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Systematic Review (2019, methodology): “Health Informatics Journal [27] Cognitive Systems Research [28] International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS) [29] Journal of medical systems [30,46,49,57,58,64,70,75,78,83] Expert Opinion on Drug Safety [31] IEEE Access [32,50,68,77] International Workshop on Emerging Technolo”
Blockchain Technology for Healthcare: Facilitating the Transition to Patient-Driven Interoperability (2018, background): “Similarly, Sync 4 Science is a pilot effort to allow patients to contribute their EHR data to research efforts, also through standard APIs, using an authorization work ﬂ ow (i.e., the data need never be stored or managed by the patient individually) [53].”
Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges (2021, methodology): “Clinical Research Data Protection: [102], [103], • Privacy enforcement • Eliminated centralization •Ensured availability Integrity requirements X X X X”
Blockchain in healthcare and health sciences - A scoping review (2019, background): “1 [19] Electronic health records Shared decision making Interoperability, access control, data integrity 2 [20] Electronic health records Health data recording, storing and sharing Access control, interoperability 3 [21] Knowledge infrastructures Aid decision-making by presenting knowledge Data inte”
Applications of blockchain in ensuring the security and privacy of electronic health record systems: A survey (2020, neutral): “Peng et al. (2018) designed a blockchain-based healthcare architecture called FHIRChain to meet Oﬃce of the National Coordinator (ONC) for health information technology requirements by encapsulating the HL7 FHIR for clinical data sharing, which can be compatible with many software libraries and…”