Smart Care: Integrating Blockchain Technology into the Design of Patient-centered Healthcare Systems

Cross-institutional sharing of medical data is essential to provide e.ective collaborative treatment and clinical decisions for patients. Medical data privacy involves ensuring only authorized parties may access the health records under the awareness and approval of patients in any circumstances. This is crucial to any healthcare system because the protection of patients' clinical data is not only an ethical responsibility but also a legal mandate. Despite the importance of medical data sharing, today's healthcare systems have not provided enough protection of patients' sensitive information to be utilized deliberately or unintentionally. Hence, there is an urgent demand for a clinical transaction mechanism that allows patients to access, trace and control their health records. In this paper, the authors focus on several limitations in the literature and propose appropriate improvement in healthcare systems by (i) addressing information security and privacy, (ii) solving the lack of trust between providers, and (iii) encouraging scalability of healthcare interoperability. Building upon these key insights, we introduce several components of a patient-centered healthcare system using smart contracts via blockchain technology. A complete code solution is publicized on the authors' GitHub repository to engage further reproducibility and improvement.