A Risk Analysis on Blockchain Technology Usage for Electronic Health Records

Abstract

Health data is one of the most valuable and highly sensitive types of data. Its careful handling is essential in today's digitalized world with the use of cloud technology for sharing. Health Information Systems facilitate the storage and accessibility of health data for better care along the patient path. As an integration of all historical patient data, the Electronic Health Record is at the heart of health data management. The centralization of stored health data represents a single point of failure and trust, making data exchange across institutions difficult and insecure. Blockchain technology builds on consensus mechanisms and immutable chains of blocks to validate and secure data transactions as a modern decentralized approach. The application of blockchain technology for Electronic Health Records is promising but still a young concept. Due to the wide range of discussions, this paper aims to identify risks of using blockchain technology in the eHealth sector. Based on a systematic literature review, various authors' argumentations and findings are examined and summarized to set up the empirical study. The semi-structured qualitative interview study aims to find out the threats posed by blockchain. The paper concludes with an overall discussion and some implementation recommendations.