A Blockchain-Based Architecture for Interoperable Healthcare Data Exchange

Patients and healthcare providers often face challenges when dealing with creating, reading, updating, sharing, and deleting operations on individual healthcare data due to incompatible electronic medical record systems and the inability to provide necessary data. These challenges can drastically prolong both a patient's diagnosis time and the time until the operation. There are many informational discrepancies when attempting to provide adequate healthcare background - especially with new providers when a full healthcare history is required. To aid in increasing interoperability, we propose a decentralized data-sharing approach. While current centralized solutions own patients’ healthcare data, we seek to put data back in the hands of the patients using blockchain as a decentralized database. In essence, our data-sharing architecture and set of rules leverage a permissioned blockchain network, Hyperledger Fabric, to give each patient on the network the ability to own and control the flow of their healthcare data.