Blockchain-based Model for Health Information Exchange: A Case for Simulated Patient Referrals Using an Electronic Medical Record

Abstract

Health information exchange (HIE) has been recognized as an effective mechanism to improve service delivery. The benefits are compounded with the introduction of electronic medical records (EMR). Exchanging information between health facilities remain a challenge due to the absence of an integrated health information system and issues pertaining to data integrity. The emergence of blockchain has provided an innovative solution to data sharing challenges in security, transparency and accessibility. This paper aims to develop a framework for health information exchange between health facilities with the use of EMR and blockchain-based network. The EMR was developed with functionalities such as adding and updating patient profile and health records, referring patient to another facility and monitoring patients referred. These functionalities have been simulated using hypothetical test cases. The simulation has demonstrated blockchain-related functions such as registration of health facility in the network, defining consensus rules and adding patient referral transactions in the network. The description of the proposed framework, role of blockchain and key features of the prototype EMR is summarized in the conclusion part.

Medical Data Storage Model Based on an Alliance Chain

“…By combining the first consensus layer and the second consensus layer sequentially according to the traditional PBFT model, the traffic in the consensus process can be greatly reduced, and the medical alliance chain system can reach consensus quickly, making the blockchain system data storage more efficient. In this paper, when acquiring medical data for chaining, compared with [12], which used IPFS for information separation technology, by uploading the PHR of patients to IPFS, its generated index is on the chain, which makes the medical alliance chain have a lower system overhead. This solves the problem of centralized medical data storage, which is difficult to share, and improves the efficiency of medical data storage.…”