Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest, 060042 Bucharest, Romania.
Faculty of Entrepreneurship, Business Engineering and Management, University Politehnica of Bucharest, 060042 Bucharest, Romania.
Sensors (Basel). 2020 Nov 16;20(22):6538. doi: 10.3390/s20226538.
Currently there is not a single trusted infrastructure used for the exchange and storage of medical data along the healthcare value chain and, thus, there is no platform used for monitoring patients' traceability within the entire healthcare chain. This situation leads to difficult communication and increased procedural costs, and thus it limits healthcare players from developing a better understanding and know-how of patients' traceability that could further boost innovation and development of the best-fitted health services. PatientDataChain blockchain-based technology is a novel approach, based on a decentralized healthcare infrastructure that incorporates a trust layer in the healthcare value chain. Our aim was to provide an integrated vision based on interoperability principles, that relies on the usage of specific sensors from various wearable devices, allowing us to collect specific data from patients' medical records. Interconnecting different healthcare providers, the collected data is integrated into a unitary personal health records (PHR) system, where the patient is the owner of his/her data. The decentralized nature of PatientDataChain, based on blockchain technology, leveraged the proper context to create a novel and improved data-sharing and exchange system, which is secure, flexible, and reliable. This approach brings increased benefits to data confidentiality and privacy, while providing secure access to patient medical records. This paper presents the design, implementation, and experimental validation of our proposed system, called PatientDataChain. The original contributions of our paper include the definition of the concept of unifying the entire healthcare value chain, the design of the architectural model of the system, the development of the system components, as well as the validation through a proof of concept (PoC) conducted with a medical clinic from Bucharest, using a dataset of 100 patients and over 1000 transactions. The proof of concept demonstrated the feasibility of the model in integrating the personal health records from heterogeneous sources (healthcare systems and sensors) in a unified, decentralized PHR system, with enhanced data exchange among healthcare players.
目前，在整个医疗价值链中，没有一个单一的可信基础设施用于医疗数据的交换和存储，因此，也没有一个平台用于监控整个医疗链中患者的可追溯性。这种情况导致沟通困难，程序成本增加，从而限制了医疗保健参与者对患者可追溯性的更好理解和掌握，这进一步阻碍了最佳医疗服务的创新和发展。PatientDataChain 区块链技术是一种基于去中心化医疗基础设施的创新方法，该基础设施在医疗价值链中纳入了信任层。我们的目标是提供一种基于互操作性原则的综合愿景，该愿景依赖于使用来自各种可穿戴设备的特定传感器，允许我们从患者的病历中收集特定数据。将不同的医疗保健提供者相互连接，收集的数据被整合到一个单一的个人健康记录 (PHR) 系统中，在这个系统中，患者是其数据的所有者。基于区块链技术的 PatientDataChain 的去中心化性质利用适当的上下文创建了一个新颖且改进的数据共享和交换系统，该系统安全、灵活且可靠。这种方法增加了数据保密性和隐私性的好处，同时提供了对患者病历的安全访问。本文介绍了我们提出的系统 PatientDataChain 的设计、实现和实验验证。本文的原创贡献包括定义统一整个医疗价值链的概念、设计系统的架构模型、开发系统组件，以及通过使用来自布加勒斯特的一家诊所的数据集（包含 100 名患者和超过 1000 笔交易）进行概念验证 (PoC) 来验证该系统的可行性。该概念验证证明了该模型在将来自异构源（医疗保健系统和传感器）的个人健康记录集成到统一的去中心化 PHR 系统中的可行性，以及增强了医疗保健参与者之间的数据交换。
