Monetisation of digital health data through a GDPR-compliant and blockchain enabled digital health data marketplace: A proposal to enhance patient's engagement with health data repositories

Abstract

With the growing use of digital technologies, the vision of a predictive, preventive and personalised healthcare system, commonly termed healthcare 4.0, is becoming tangible. However, the manifestation of healthcare 4.0 relies on empowering patients as active stakeholders of the healthcare system and transforming traditionally siloed data repositories into accessible ones. Combining blockchain-like distributed technology and Airbnb-like sharing economy model, this paper proposes a digital health data marketplace (DHDM) through which patients, as the data producer, can sell their health data to data consumers like medical practitioners, researchers, policymakers and machine learning algorithm developers without compromising privacy and security. In conjunction with the Welsh Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank, a traditional centralised and siloed data repository, DHDM was evaluated in a simulated environment to understand the technical feasibility, regulation compliance and, most importantly, the impact of such marketplace on healthcare 4.0 transformation.