Fhirchain: applying blockchain to securely and scalably share clinical data
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Conventional Edge or Cloud processes cannot guarantee accountability and tractability of patient's data due to third party involvement.
“conventional Edge [5] or Cloud process [6] cannot guarantee accountability and tractability of patient's data due to third party involvement.”
From Blockchain leveraged decentralized IoT ehealth framework (2020) · cites this paper as [6]
Privacy-preserved blockchain architectures are available.
“On the contrary, privacy-preserved blockchain architectures are also available [28,29].”
From Proof-of-familiarity: a privacy-preserved blockchain scheme for collaborative medical decision-making (2019) · cites this paper as [28]
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“Although this technology is still more associated with the financial area [43], nowadays, there are many pilot projects currently underway, such as FHIRChain [44], Cancer Gene Trust [45], and Zenome [46].”
BackgroundHossain, M. J., Wadud, M. A. H., Rahman, A., Ferdous, J., Alam, M. S., Amir - Ul - Haque Bhuiyan, T. M., & Mridha, M. F. (2021) · 2021 International Conference on Science & Contemporary Technologies (ICSCT) · doi:10.1109/icsct53883.2021.9642537 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
- Authors
- Zhang, P., White, J., Schmidt, D. C., Lenz, G., & Rosenbloom, S. T.
- Affiliations
- Vanderbilt University (US)
- Varian Medical Systems (United States) (US)
- Vanderbilt University Medical Center (US)
- Corresponding author
- Zhang, Peng
- Venue
- Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal
- Published
- 2018-01
- Volume
- 16
- Pages
- 267-278
- ISSN
- 2001-0370 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6082774
- OpenAlex
- W2963993810
- Cited by
- 796
- References
- 46
- Citations by year
- 2026: 64 · 2025: 102 · 2024: 102 · 2023: 112 · 2022: 118 · 2021: 106 · 2020: 104 · 2019: 81 · 2018: 7
- FWCI
- 119.90
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Varian Medical Systems
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Electronic Health Records Systems
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology in Education and Learning
- Keywords
- blockchain, clinical data sharing, FHIR, HL7, decentralized applications, clinical decision-making, data security, interoperability
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