Hyperledger Global Forum

Due to the privacy and high sensitivity of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and the lack of systematic infrastructure support, most EHR data sharing still happens through fax or mails, which can incur major and possibly critical delays of patient care. Therefore, there is an impeding need for a patient-centric system that will facilitate secure and trustable management of EHR data originated from multiple hospitals, which is often the case, in particular, for patients with chronic diseases and serious medical conditions such as cancer.
Researchers from the universities in US and Switzerland, and in collaboration with medical doctors from University Hospital in US, employed Hyperledger Fabric to build ACTION-EHR - a prototype of patient-centric blockchain-based EHR data management system. A Web application is developed for patients and doctors for initiating EHR sharing transactions. A hybrid data management approach was chosen. The system ensures patient privacy protection and security guarantees with respect to the requirements to the healthcare data management, including the access control policy specified by the patients.
Alevtina will present a demo of the prototype that has been tested in a distributed environment at Stony Brook University and demonstrated the feasibility of applying Hyperledger Fabric to address various inefficiencies of health care-related processes, by enabling better traceability, transparency, and efficiency. She will also discuss major challenges of mass adoption of such system. In particular, she will focus on current capabilities of Hyperledger Fabric from technical, legal, and social perspectives when developing blockchain-based system in healthcare settings.