Blockchain Technology for Healthcare: Facilitating the Transition to Patient-Driven Interoperability

By William J. Gordon, Christian Catalini. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, 2018

665 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Interoperability in healthcare has traditionally been focused around data exchange between business entities, for example, different hospital systems. However, there has been a recent push towards patient-driven interoperability, in which health data exchange is patient-mediated and patient-driven. Patient-centered interoperability, however, brings with it new challenges and requirements around security and privacy, technology, incentives, and governance that must be addressed for this type of data sharing to succeed at scale. In this paper, we look at how blockchain technology might facilitate this transition through five mechanisms: (1) digital access rules, (2) data aggregation, (3) data liquidity, (4) patient identity, and (5) data immutability. We then look at barriers to blockchain-enabled patient-driven interoperability, specifically clinical data transaction volume, privacy and security, patient engagement, and incentives. We conclude by noting that while patient-driving interoperability is an exciting trend in healthcare, given these challenges, it remains to be seen whether blockchain can facilitate the transition from institution-centric to patient-centric data sharing.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Health Information Management, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76aed56db6aa48c9a6ec28bb2671dd49c0bb3d99

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Citations in the corpus

Blockchain technology in healthcare: Challenges and opportunities (2020, background): “Ine ﬃ cient interoperability creates two types of problems [5]: the di ﬃ culty of identifying patients and information blocking where healthcare providers are imposing an unreasonable constraint on the exchange of patient data or electronic health information.”
Using Blockchain for Electronic Health Records (2019, background): “Gordon and Catalini [14], conducted a study that focused on the methods by which blockchain technology would facilitate the healthcare sector.”
Blockchain for Secure EHRs Sharing of Mobile Cloud Based E-Health Systems (2019, background): “Recently, there has been a growing interest in employing the blockchain technology to promote medical and e-health services [1]–[3].”
A Blockchain-Based Smart Contract System for Healthcare Management (2020, background): “Gordon and Catalini [37] published a review on healthcare blockchain where they concluded their discussion on how blockchain technology can enable patient-centric control of healthcare data sharing over institution centric control.”
Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Systematic Review (2019, background): “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”