An International Accreditation System for Healthcare Professionals Based on Blockchain

Abstract

For health practitioners, accreditation processes are necessary for their career development. The importance is not restricted to attesting competencies and skills, it may even certify that some professionals are legally capable and authorized to perform a specific complex procedures, such as kidney transplantation. For example, physicians are crossing national borders with their practice, especially in Europe, and patients are becoming more demanding, thus in need of reliable information regarding health professionals. In this context, we propose a scenario to exemplify and to elucidate an emerging problem, that is, an opportunity. Let us consider that a group of national societies on transplantation biology and medicine decides to create an International Accreditation System for health professionals. The system would be a decentralized institution composed of multiple organizations, because accreditation is about trustworthiness, which naturally suggests the use of blockchain technology. Hence, in this work, we propose the use of blockchain and service design in healthcare, as fundamentals for the conceptual design of an international accreditation system for health professionals. Additionally, this work may be understood as a strategy for modeling, designing and developing healthcare systems based on blockchain technology.