Hello,

very interesting topic! Maybe these papers help:

Article Blockchain-based electronic healthcare record system for hea...

Article Using Blockchain for Electronic Health Records

Article Blockchain based searchable encryption for electronic health...

Article Applications of Blockchain in Ensuring the Security and Priv...

Article A blockchain‐based architecture for securing electronic heal...

Conference Paper A Design of Blockchain-Based Architecture for the Security o...

Best regards

Marius

Hi Kingsley Enwere , I will first say a big congratulations on your thesis and on working on this interesting topic. I will attempt to explain that most computer Security including those offered by blockchain relay on cryptographic encryption algorithms and techniques. A comfortable grasp of those is always the first step.

What then does blockchain bring that traditional one database does not have, or that distributed-database like Hadoop does not have? It is the concept of shared custodianship/ownership of shared database (and/or logs). At a high level, that is what blockchain does, eliminating the need for human audits, need for a trusted intermediary in multi-party transactions.

Ofcourse this then leads to many other problems like cost of running such system, introducing consensus algorithm techniques and a lot of other technical areas.

Specifically, for how blockchain is used in healthcare, here is our aggregated healthcare uses

Article A Systematic Review of Blockchain in Healthcare: Frameworks,...

Marius Mueller ...Thank you for your kind response and help I really appreciate it. I will be in touch to ask more questions and hope you won't mind that?

Kingsley Enwere I am more than happy to provide additional insight. In case you want to focus your research even more. As blockchain itself is broad.

Hi Kingsley,

You are working on a very big topic here. Big companies (and big oney) is tied up in Electronic Health Records. This software normally centralised controll of a patient index or registry (and all the personal privcy and consent / role based access that goes with it). It places ths EMR software entities in a very powerful position with respect to managing (controlling?) the data.

There is a 'dristributed' model for healthcare that follows an open international standard. This is acalled IHE (Integrating the Healthcae Enterprise). This set of profiles establishes a central index (Registry) and also has established mechnanisms for managing patients' privacy/consent for sharing data through an Audit Tracking and Node Authenticaion profile (ATNA). You can see how taking the network management out of Electronic Medical Records software (central databases applications) and putting this in the network layer necessitates that the access control/privacy consent is also managed in the network layer.

I always see this kind of 'open standards' interoperability (not just messaging between applications) as being a kind of patient centric democratisation of the data.

Now, you are looking at a further step with blockchain. Ultimately, what is blockchain? It is only a de-centralised register or index. Curically, block chain also embdies privacy/access rules too. You are not the first to consider this in healthcare, but I don't know of any wide scale implementations. Places where it is implementedd (perhaps not surprisingly) is in Personal Held Records for healthcare (or Personal Health Records - these two terms are used interchangably). The difficuly is they are effectivly proprietary implementations of a blockchain method to make a distributed registry. From this point of view they are no more open than a proprietary EMR.

Really what is needed is some open standard for the use of blockchain - this leads me to say something I feel is important. If you want to go down this track, please look at the work of the IHE. IHE embdies many (even most) aspects of healthcare with dedicaed Profiles for Radiology, Pathology, General Records ...

If you want to work n de-centralising the registry/privacy elements of health records, look at how IHE uses the registry/ATNA in all the profiles, and see how you can make that work with blockchain. IHE doesn't say "how you should implement a registry/ATNA" it just says it should exist and behave functionally in a certain way. So why not use blockchain :) Good luck on your journey and have fun.

Hi Robin,

Thank you for this insightful lead. I will definitely look at the IHE and ATNA and how they can work with blockchain.

Warm Regards.