Blockchain based Collaborative Health Information Exchange

As health information is shared across different health care institutions, its semantics must be consistently maintained in order to maximize its value and usage. However, due to lack of adoption of a single authoritative electronic information exchange standard (EIES), semantic interoperability still poses a major challenge. Another important challenge in a health information exchange (HIE) is the security of the network infrastructure. Since patients' records in each healthcare information system (HIS) are annotated with ontologies using EIES, ontology mapping can be one of the most effective ways to establish semantic provisioning among heterogeneous HIS. For secure HIE and storage, blockchain can be seen as a potential candidate due to its intrinsic properties of security, immutability, transparency, and ability to cut middleman. Therefore, this study presents a blockchain based collaborative health information exchange system that integrates blockchain and semi-automated ontological mapping to enable secure and interoperable HIE among different healthcare institutions.