BlockMed: Blockchain-based Electronic Consent Management for Secure and Privacy-Protected Healthcare Interoperability (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arghya Kusum Das ◽  
Ajanta Das
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Health Information ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Management System ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Care Service ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Smart Contracts ◽  
Report Generation

BACKGROUND An electronic consent management system can improve the care service significantly by balancing the risks to patient privacy with the benefits of health information exchange and interoperability. Patients leave their health information on multiple providers’ silo. A holistic report and privacy-preserved analysis can help to expedite several medical services including both personal- and community-care. Furthermore, access to consent-based, anonymous health records can accelerate innovation in health services and researches. OBJECTIVE We propose BlockMed, a proof-of-concept (POC) for a novel, cost-effective e-consent management system. Given proper consent, BlockMed can query the patient’s information fractured over multiple healthcare-providers’ silo make it available to the patient. At the same time, BlockMed also enables privacy-preserved data analysis by third-party service providers in the same system. Leveraging the unique and anonymous Ethereum id, BlockMed masks out the patient’s original identification in the provider’s secured local silo and abstract away any complication caused by changes in the identification information on multiple silos. METHODS The core functionalities of BlockMed are developed with a set of smart contracts on Ethereum blockchain. To develop those smart contracts, we have divided the potential users into three different groups such as, patient, provider, and third-party analyzer. Users are identified by their anonymous Ethereum id and need to sign the consent to access healthcare data. After signing, BlockMed can automatically initiate the queries to fetch data from providers’ data warehouse, enables analysis on any third-party service provider’s infrastructure if required, and finally, presents a report to the intended users including the patient. The signed consents stay on Ethereum forever leaving a permanent audit trail to uphold the integrity of the system. RESULTS We evaluated our system in terms of its functionality and cost. Our decentralized application (DApp) can not only query the data from multiple providers' silo but also enable third-party report generation with proper consent and privacy. Masking out the actual patient identification information under anonymous Ethereum ID our DApp can operate irrespective of geographical boundaries. Our cost analysis shows that the adoption of decentralized blockchain-based technology can avoid huge amount of capital investment required for similar services using centralized infrastructure such as AWS cloud. CONCLUSIONS Many prior studies have already confirmed that blockchain can improve and expedite data sharing among different providers. Our POC, BlockMed takes it to one step ahead where the data analysis is also integrated. We prove the efficacy of BlockMed by evaluating its functionalities qualitatively as well as its comparing its cost with an alternative cloud-based architecture.

scholarly journals MEDICAL DROP BOX (MDB); A NATIONAL HEALTH INFORMATION EXCHANGE AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR MEDICAL INDUSTRY

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (04) ◽  
pp. 489-498
Author(s):  
Imran Khan ◽  
Muhammad Sher ◽  
Dr. Samina Aslam ◽  
Syed M. Saqlain ◽  
M. Usman Ashraf ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Information ◽  
National Health ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Management System ◽  
Health Information Exchange ◽  
Medical Industry

scholarly journals A Policy and Practice Review of Consumer Protections and Their Application to Hospital-Sourced Data Aggregation and Analytics by Third-Party Companies

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasiliki Rahimzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Health Information ◽  
Data Aggregation ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Data Privacy ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Hospital Data ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Aggregated Data ◽  
Consumer Privacy ◽  
Privacy Act

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology estimates that 96% of all U.S. hospitals use a basic electronic health record, but only 62% are able to exchange health information with outside providers. Barriers to information exchange across EHR systems challenge data aggregation and analysis that hospitals need to evaluate healthcare quality and safety. A growing number of hospital systems are partnering with third-party companies to provide these services. In exchange, companies reserve the rights to sell the aggregated data and analyses produced therefrom, often without the knowledge of patients from whom the data were sourced. Such partnerships fall in a regulatory grey area and raise new ethical questions about whether health, consumer, or health and consumer privacy protections apply. The current opinion probes this question in the context of consumer privacy reform in California. It analyzes protections for health information recently expanded under the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CA Privacy Act”) in 2020 and compares them to protections outlined in the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (“Federal Privacy Rule”). Four perspectives are considered in this ethical analysis: 1) standards of data deidentification; 2) rights of patients and consumers in relation to their health information; 3) entities covered by the CA Privacy Act; 4) scope and complementarity of federal and state regulations. The opinion concludes that the CCPA is limited in its application when health information is processed by a third-party data aggregation company that is contractually designated as a business associate; when health information is deidentified; and when hospital data are sourced from publicly owned and operated hospitals. Lastly, the opinion offers practical recommendations for facilitating parity between state and federal health data privacy laws and for how a more equitable distribution of informational risks and benefits from the sale of aggregated hospital data could be fostered and presents ways both for-profit and nonprofit hospitals can sustain patient trust when negotiating partnerships with third-party data aggregation companies.

scholarly journals Health Information Exchange Organizations and Their Support for Research: Current State and Future Outlook

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 004695801771370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Parker ◽  
Mathew Reeves ◽  
Michael Weiner ◽  
Julia Adler-Milstein
Keyword(s):  
Health Information ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Health Information Exchange ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Electronic Health ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Electronic Health Information ◽  
Support Research

Federal investment spurred health information exchange organization (HIO) development and maturation to provide third-party approaches to electronic health information exchange across disparate electronic health record (EHR) systems. By creating opportunities for data aggregation across multiple medical institutions, HIOs also spur research. Using data from a 2015 national web-based survey of HIOs (N = 64), we identified HIOs supporting or not supporting research, and compared characteristics of the 2 groups. We found that 15 (23%) of the 64 HIOs reported supporting research, 30 (47%) reported planning to support research, and 19 (30%) did not support research. Research-supporting HIOs were more likely than nonresearch supporting HIOs to offer advanced functionality, such as allowing users to query and retrieve data from multiple sources. Our study offers encouraging preliminary evidence that HIOs are supporting research, which could offer a solution to current challenges in creating comprehensive longitudinal clinical data sources for research.

Perceptions of a Collaborative Professional Learning Program: Seeing the “Bigger Picture”

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
P. Charlie Buckley ◽  
Kimberly A. Murza ◽  
Tami Cassel
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Professional Learning ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Special Educators ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Integrative Approach ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Learning Program ◽  
Speech Language Pathologists ◽  
Related Service

Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of special education practitioners (i.e., speech-language pathologists, special educators, para-educators, and other related service providers) on their role as communication partners after participation in the Social Communication and Engagement Triad (Buckley et al., 2015 ) yearlong professional learning program. Method A qualitative approach using interviews and purposeful sampling was used. A total of 22 participants who completed participation in either Year 1 or Year 2 of the program were interviewed. Participants were speech-language pathologists, special educators, para-educators, and other related service providers. Using a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967 ) to data analysis, open, axial, and selective coding procedures were followed. Results Three themes emerged from the data analysis and included engagement as the goal, role as a communication partner, and importance of collaboration. Conclusions Findings supported the notion that educators see the value of an integrative approach to service delivery, supporting students' social communication and engagement across the school day but also recognizing the challenges they face in making this a reality.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document