Context (archaeology)

World Wide Web

Health care

Biology

Information sharing

Computer security

Interoperability

Economics

Blockchain

Health information

Scalability

Computer science

Business

Paleontology

Alternative medicine

Process management

Database

Data science

Data exchange

Medicine

Economic growth

Health information exchange

Data sharing

Pathology

Key (lock)

Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal

Secure and scalable data sharing is essential for collaborative clinical decision making. Conventional clinical data efforts are often siloed, however, which creates barriers to efficient information exchange and impedes effective treatment decision made for patients. This paper provides four contributions to the study of applying blockchain technology to clinical data sharing in the context of technical requirements defined in the "Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap" from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). First, we analyze the ONC requirements and their implications for blockchain-based systems. Second, we present FHIRChain, which is a blockchain-based architecture designed to meet ONC requirements by encapsulating the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard for shared clinical data. Third, we demonstrate a FHIRChain-based decentralized app using digital health identities to authenticate participants in a case study of collaborative decision making for remote cancer care. Fourth, we highlight key lessons learned from our case study.

FHIRChain: Applying Blockchain to Securely and Scalably Share Clinical Data