Authors:
Maria Inês da Fonseca Ribeiro
and
André Vasconcelos
Affiliation:
INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Healthcare, Interoperability, Blockchain, Smart Contracts, MedBlock, MedClick.
Abstract:
Nowadays, healthcare data is generated every day from both medical institutions and individuals. Store and share such large amounts of data is expensive, challenging as well as critical. This challenge leads to a scenario of a lack of interoperability between health institutions and consequently to a patient's health data scattered across numerous systems. Blockchain emerges as a solution to these problems. It consists of a distributed database where records are saved with cryptographic encryption, making them immutable, transparent and decentralized. There are multiple healthcare applications blockchain-based that are being actively developed in order to solve the problem of interoperability between different health providers. The main objective of this work is to analyse and survey the blockchain technology and to study the smart contracts development, for the purpose of healthcare applications. Since this research is developed in the context of MedClick – a web platform that has t
he goal to give patients the possibility to save their health data plus interact with all the medical institutions they choose to, in one single site – an additional goal of this paper is to set the architecture to MedBlock – the MedClick platform based on blockchain and smart contracts.
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