Abstract
New types of patient health records aim to help physicians shift from a medical practice, often based on their personal experience, towards one of evidence based medicine, thus improving the communication among patients and care providers and increasing the availability of personal medical information. These new records, allowing patients and care providers to share medical data and clinical information, and access them whenever they need, can be considered enabling Ambient Assisted Living technologies. Furthermore, new personal disease monitoring tools support specialists in their tasks, as an example allowing acquisition, transmission and analysis of medical images. The growing interest around these new technologies poses serious questions regarding data integrity and transaction security. The huge amount of sensitive data stored in these new records surely attracts the interest of malicious hackers, therefore it is necessary to guarantee the integrity and the maximum security of servers and transactions. Blockchain technology can be an important turning point in the development of personal health records. This paper discusses some issues regarding the management and protection of health data exchanged through new medical or diagnostic devices.
Highlights
Diagnostic and treatment choices are often driven by physicians’ opinions and not always based on scientific evidence
The United States (US) Institute of Medicine stated that medical errors cause 49,000 to 98,000 deaths in US hospitals every year [2]
Blockchain technology is receiving a lot of attention from individuals and organizations of all types and sizes
Summary
Diagnostic and treatment choices are often driven by physicians’ opinions and not always based on scientific evidence. With the development of new EHRs, a lot of portable and wearable medical devices and apps, allowing the detection of numerous clinical parameters at citizens’ homes or wherever the citizens need, have been developed in recent years. In addition to supporting the choices of each citizen, an EHR should allow health professionals to have immediately available the report of a previous radiography, and the radiography itself, even on its portable device, as required; a cardiologist will be able to view previous reports and directly view previous electrocardiograms, echocardiograms and coronary angiography of the patient they are visiting, certainly obtaining a more complete view of the patient’s condition without necessarily having to trust the reports of other colleagues, who can be very good, but can be wrong, as we said at the beginning of this paper. Most existing studies about Distributed Ledger Technologies and IoT in health care are focused on the conceptual design of health data sharing systems, in order to make possible data sharing with hospitals and researchers that will be able to gather relevant data for their studies [31]
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