A System for the Promotion of Traceability and Ownership of Health Data Using Blockchain

Abstract

The advent of wireless technologies and the development of more and better globally connected mobile devices, leverage real time health monitoring. Mobile health (m-health) promise to deliver health services anytime and anywhere, improving user convenience and enabling faster diagnoses without the need to travel to healthcare facilities. The use of m-health applications on mobile devices with the support of cloud computing is nowadays a technology trend that has many advantages, but also poses several challenges, especially on the data storage and privacy. Blockchain technology is an exponentially growing technology used in various research areas from finance, voting mechanisms, production chains, among others. This technology provides important characteristics such as immutability, non-repudiation, transparency, and reducing the need for intermediaries. Hence, this paper presents a novel approach for blockchain technology applied to m-health systems. This proposal allows an easy and fast integration with other health systems or applications allowing a patient-user to access his electronic health record in a more secure way. The data is traceable throughout the system, however maintaining the necessary anonymity. Hence, a prototype for a blockchain-based solution using Hyperledger Fabric was developed. This implementation enables the creation of a chronologically organized and immutable health data record. To create an anonymous storage system, the proposed system uses two separate database components that maintain data traceability through sets of IDs stored in the blockchain. Furthermore, the development of the proposed system was evaluated in terms of performance and network configurations of the Hyperledger Fabric.

Analysis of barriers of mHealth adoption in the context of sustainable operational practices in health care supply chains

“…The conceptual development of mHealth integrated BCT can be a valuable tool for management to improve a hospital's performance through intellectual technology (Ichikawa et al. , 2017; Pinto et al. , 2022; Sharma et al.…”

Trusted Traceability and Certification of Refurbished Medical Devices Using Dynamic Composable NFTs

“…The proposed solution aims to offer a reliable track and trace of critical information and data generated at every stage of blood supply while ensuring the privacy of participants. Pinto et al [19] propose a system for traceability and ownership of health data using blockchain technology. The proposed approach is based on Hyperledger Fabric and allows for the storage and secure access of a chronologically organized and immutable record of health data while preserving the necessary anonymity of medical information.…”

“…Our proposed solution, along with [18] and [26], utilizes the Ethereum blockchain network, while [19] and [23] use Hyperledger Fabric, [24] implements a custom network, and [31] uses VeChainThor. Our solution, along with [26], also integrates off-chain decentralized storage, which is not found in the other solutions.…”

A Privacy-Preserved and User Self-Governance Blockchain-Based Framework to Combat COVID-19 Depression in Social Media

“…We then compared this with the same blockchain-based health information model (Table 5) [125] [126]. where the costs of the other models are derived from the average price of one transaction in ether.…”