Combining distributed and centralised approaches to develop a hybrid methodology for data management in healthcare

Abstract

In the 21st century, the combination of rapid technological developments as well as the adoption of emerging technologies has impacted almost every area of everyday life. These developments have even affected domains that traditionally operate without the help of Information and Communication technologies (ICT) but now see an increase in digitization of their processes. Healthcare is one of those domains that is being revolutionized via the emergence of the e-health and m-health paradigms as well as the automation of medical processes, robotics, and Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices and sensors. These developments, apart from modernizing healthcare and providing quality-of-life solutions to both healthcare practitioners and patients, have also led to an increase in the availability of digital medical data, which are nowadays being structured in Electronic Health Records (EHRs). EHRs contain various health data about a patient and are the basis for the development and implementation of various innovative solutions in healthcare. Such solutions mainly aim to address some of the current shortcomings of EHRs such as the centralized storage, which makes them vulnerable to mass hacker attacks as well as the lack of interoperability among various medical standards that are used to structure EHRs, which makes it hard to manage and share them across different healthcare providers. The scope of this publication is to introduce blockchain technology as a potential solution to the aforementioned challenges and present a novel methodology and architecture that have been developed to be implemented in a healthcare application. The methodology presented in this paper leverages both blockchain and centralized databases, making it a hybrid approach but aims to set the basis for developing blockchain-powered healthcare solutions for data management. Under that context and the need to combine blockchain with centralized databases, the security parameters of the system are also tailored to work specifically with that kind of approach. The end-goal of the methodology and architecture presented in this publication is to give patients ownership of their data, help them manage and share them as they see fit, while at the same time keeping in mind that large healthcare providers must have access to the same information in a secure manner for the well-being of their patients. It is considered that this hybrid approach offers a well-tailored solution for both stakeholders. © Ibero-American WWW / Internet Conference 2020.