Integrating Healthcare Data for Enhanced Citizen-Centred Care and Analytics

Abstract

The potential of healthcare systems worldwide is expanding as new medical devices and data sources are regularly presented to healthcare providers which could be used to personalise, improve and revise treatments further. However, there is presently a large gap between the data collected, the systems that store the data, and any ability to perform big data analytics to combinations of such data. This paper suggests a novel approach to integrate data from multiple sources and formats, by providing a uniform structure to the data in a healthcare data lake with multiple zones reflecting how refined the data is: from raw to curated when ready to be consumed or used for analysis. The integration further requires solutions that can be proven to be secure, such as patient-centric data sharing agreements (smart contracts) on a blockchain, and novel privacy-preserving methods for extracting metadata from data sources, originally derived from partially-structured or from completely unstructured data. Work presented here is being developed as part of an EU project with the ultimate aim to develop solutions for integrating healthcare data for enhanced citizen-centred care and analytics across Europe.

A Blockchain-Based Healthcare Platform for Secure Personalised Data Sharing

“…Healthcare systems must adapt to modern digital transformation practices [1], [2]. Seamless integration of medical records and patient experience form the basis of improved health and social care services [3]. In Europe, an expectation to facilitate crossborder transfer of medical records and enhance healthcare provision would require robust guarantees of trust in the healthcare data sharing system [4].…”

“…The ultimate goal is the improvement of end-user experience, with adequate measures to address security and privacy concerns relating to integrated medical records that will be accessible anywhere, at anytime. Our proposed platform [3], [6], [7] known as the Serums Smart Health Centre System (SHCS), comprises of two key components: a hyperledger fabric blockchain utilising smart contracts and individual data lakes for each healthcare provider. Smart contracts allow for business logic to be stored on a distributed network.…”

“…Furthermore, in a distributed network we avoid a single rule controller and allow for redundancy across the network to address possible temporary connectivity failures. Each data lake follows a precisely defined schema with clearly defined boundaries between the processing layers that have been applied to the medical data sets [3]. Their primary role is to format the data, at time of request, into a data vault structure, allowing for multiple sets of distinct data to be joined into a single record known as Smart Patient Health Record (SPHR) [7].…”

Conflict-Free Access Rules for Sharing Smart Patient Health Records

“…The EU project Serums 2 [5,8,20,26] proposes the design of a rule-based authorisation mechanism, blending blockchain and data lake technologies, in a secure patient-centric data sharing platform. The project deals with modern challenges such as the size, complexity and variety of data format present in patient health records, which demand solutions that efficiently unifies these formats into an extensible and flexible standard, and ensures interoperability between data systems placed in different locations.…”

“…The Serums Smart Patient Health Record (SPHR) is the unified format proposed to integrate distributed sources of patient information registered in Europe [8,20]. The SPHR contains metadata, linking the patient medical history in a structured way in the data lake, built across authorised healthcare providers and approved health data sources.…”