Improving the Healthcare Effectiveness: The Possible Role of EHR, IoMT and Blockchain

Abstract

New types of patient health records aim to help physicians shift from a medical practice, often based on their personal experience, towards one of evidence based medicine, thus improving the communication among patients and care providers and increasing the availability of personal medical information. These new records, allowing patients and care providers to share medical data and clinical information, and access them whenever they need, can be considered enabling Ambient Assisted Living technologies. Furthermore, new personal disease monitoring tools support specialists in their tasks, as an example allowing acquisition, transmission and analysis of medical images. The growing interest around these new technologies poses serious questions regarding data integrity and transaction security. The huge amount of sensitive data stored in these new records surely attracts the interest of malicious hackers, therefore it is necessary to guarantee the integrity and the maximum security of servers and transactions. Blockchain technology can be an important turning point in the development of personal health records. This paper discusses some issues regarding the management and protection of health data exchanged through new medical or diagnostic devices.

Mobile Health in Remote Patient Monitoring for Chronic Diseases: Principles, Trends, and Challenges

“…While the GDPR is a privacy directive that instructs how organizations should handle personal data, the NISD emphasizes strengthening organizations’ security capability from the service infrastructure viewpoints. The work in [ 83 ] identified a set of different measures that can be integrated with m-health systems to adopt GDPR-compliant security and privacy schemes. Recently, the work in [ 179 ] provides a case study of the “WELCOME” research project, an integrated system for chronic patients’ monitoring, diagnosis, detection, and treatment.…”

“…HL7 does not have specific software, but it provides healthcare organizations with specifications that make the system interoperable. Several studies have been used HL7 to resolve interoperability issues [ 82 , 83 ]. For example, in [ 84 ], the authors provide an EHR data model that uses object-relational data to solve problems related to dynamic design changes and sparse, time-varying, or high-dimensional data.…”

“…Unless HL7 v3 is developed to overcome the shortage in HL7 v2, it is criticized widely by the industry, as it is internally inconsistent, too expensive, and complex to implement. Thus, HL7 embarked on the creation of new standards known as FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) [ 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 , 86 ]. FHIR belongs to the HL7 family and it took advantage of the earliest version of HL7 (HL7 v1, HL7 v2, and HL7 v3) [ 80 ].…”

Blockchain and COVID-19 Pandemic: Applications and Challenges

“…During the COVID-19 pandemic, many counties have reported the shortage of PPEs in hospitals due to a lack of a trusted system to present accurate data about demand and supply of PPEs. In certain cases, the limited supply of PPEs against its suddenly increased demand in the health sector forced medical professionals to use tape to patch-up tore masks to prevent contact with COVID-19 [3,[26][27][28][29]. Several countries and organizations have experienced the supply of low-quality PPEs including face masks.…”

A Risk Analysis on Blockchain Technology Usage for Electronic Health Records

“…Well-known are networks of anamnesis, diagnostics, and therapy by cooperative sharing of unalterable, reliable patient data. Other areas in medicine, such as research and development, billing, and insurance, can also be effectively integrated within blockchain [6,[67][68][69][70]. Using blockchain, anonymized patient data can be made available to the research community to develop Big Data cases [71,72].…”