Toward a Blockchain Healthcare Information Exchange

Abstract

The introduction of healthcare information exchange (HIE) systems has been limited, although its compelling social need has been recognized. This could be due to medical institutions’ concerns about information leakage and decreasing profit. The existing research proposals suppose that the medical institutions would accept the system without incentives for medical institutions to be proactive in it. Herein, we propose the HIE system that provides incentives to both medical institutions and patients using blockchain technology. By using the system, we expect that both patients and medical institutions will proactively share medical information. We also evaluate the implementation of the proposed system and measure time required to share medical information to demonstrate that the system could function in a reasonable time. The system will help reducing concerns about information leakage and decreasing profit.