Abstract
Electronic health records (EHRs) have become a popular method to store and manage patients’ data in hospitals. Sharing these records makes the current healthcare data management system more accurate and cost-efficient. Currently, EHRs are stored using the client/server architecture by which each hospital retains the stewardship of the patients’ data. The records of a patient are scattered among different hospitals using heterogeneous database servers. These limitations constitute a burden towards a personalized healthcare, when it comes to offering a cohesive view and a shared, secure and private access to patients’ health history for multiple allied professionals and the patients. The data availability, privacy and security characteristics of the blockchain have a propitious future in the healthcare presenting solutions to the complexity, confidentiality, integrity, interoperability and privacy issues of the current client/server architecture-based EHR management system. This paper analyzes and compares the performance of the blockchain and the client/server paradigms. The results reveal that notable performance can be achieved using blockchain in a patient-centric approach. In addition, the immutable and valid patients’ data in the blockchain can aid allied health professionals in better prognosis and diagnosis support through machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Highlights
Healthcare data management is the process of storing and analyzing patients’ health records to improve patient treatment, track the causes of diseases efficiently, manufacture effective medicines and establish an accurate prevention agenda
While many researchers investigated the application of blockchain for healthcare data management, to our knowledge there is no evaluation of this new paradigm with the traditional client/server model
The client/server model suffers from the issue of data stewardship, data fragmentation, vulnerability, security and privacy
Summary
Healthcare data management is the process of storing and analyzing patients’ health records to improve patient treatment, track the causes of diseases efficiently, manufacture effective medicines and establish an accurate prevention agenda. EHRs are often required to be shared among different healthcare organizations, medical drug manufacturers, pharmacists, medical insurance providers, researchers and patients. This poses a serious challenge in keeping the patients’ sensitive data secure and up to date. MTBC PHR: Personal Health Records for Patients. Available online: https://www.capzule.com/ (accessed on 5 March 2020)
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