APPLYING BLOCKCHAIN AND DISTRIBUTED LEDGER TO IMPROVE THE ACCESSIBILITY, SECURITY AND PRIVACY OF ELECTRONIC HEALTH DATA

Abstract

As the concept Transparency is key to information exchange amongst systems running on different platforms. And the healthcare is from one of the key industries that seek transparency, confidentiality and integrity of stored data. Beyond the security concerns of the E-health industry interoperability is also major issue and in current trend systems operate within the hospital domain cannot communicate with other health facilities in order to share information. This makes it hard for health practitioners to share patient data and access medical history which facilitate evidence based decision-making at all levels of the system especially at the point of origin. This research sought to investigate why hospitals, that are using he manual system, and developers, who try to automate, faced with challenges to standardize existing systems, to integrate legacy with modern platforms and to achieve interoperability. To this end, interviews were conducted to get general information on sharing of patient data. Findings indicate that current systems do not allow sharing of health data. This thesis work, therefore, developed a platform that uses Blockchain technology and distributed file systems to integrate the existing health information systems so as to facilitate a fast and secure data exchange, facilitating interoperability at the end. Based on the performance evaluation made using primary end users revealed that the framework prototype allowed patients to port data and share it with different doctors on demand. Moreover, it ensured that a permanent reference of the data is stored in a distributed ledger that is sharable and interoperable using different application frontends.