A Patient-Centric Interoperable, Quorum-based Healthcare System for Sharing Clinical Data

Abstract

In the current Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, the healthcare organizations have the ownership of patient's EMR. Patients have only limited information of the EMR in the form of discharge summary and reports. This was viewed a problem in eHealth consultations during a pandemic like COVID-19, when doctors does not have access to patient data. Patient is the owner of the data and patient should have control over his medical data and should be able to share the data according to his requirement. So currently work is being undertaken to develop patient-centric EMR system. One major challenge here is to ensure the privacy and access management of data being accessed and shared. This paper aims to solve these challenges by using a permissioned blockchain network based FHIR solution for secure interoperability. The proposed system was evaluated by developing a prototype on Quorum Blockchain. The throughput and latency characteristics of the system was analyzed with different workloads and results was promising.