A Patient-Centric Interoperable Framework for Health Information Exchange via Blockchain

Abstract

To design a blockchain-based framework for the cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS) and integration of electronic health records (EHR). In compliance with the integrated healthcare enterprise (IHE) profile, the XDS of EHRs were sent to the EHR cloud repository from each registered healthcare providers or by users themselves, and their link was shared and incorporated into a blockchain framework by using the same identifier for the same patient. In our proposed system, we used the link of XDS repository to hash the XDS EHR with SHA-256, which is a string of 64 HEX characters (32 bytes), and embossed it with a timestamp to indicate when the document was created or recorded in the blockchain. Then, the interested stakeholders verified the authenticity of the XDS EHR document by taking the hash of the document and matching it with the hash value stored in the Blockchain. A decentralized, non-tamperable, and encrypted storage framework was prototyped to enable the integration and sharing of XDS EHR. In this prototype, patient-centric EHR of different healthcare providers could be accessed in the blockchain dashboard of health records. The proposed blockchain framework provides a solution for the longitudinal storage of patient EHR and for sharing it in a secure and patient-centric way.