Blockchain application in healthcare service mode based on Health Data Bank
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Jianxia GONG, Lindu ZHAO
Blockchain application in healthcare service mode based on Health Data Bank
© Higher Education Press 2020
Abstract Blockchain is commonly considered a potential disruptive technology. Moreover, the healthcare industry has experienced rapid growth in the adoption of health information technology, such as electronic health records and electronic medical records. To guarantee data privacy and data security as well as to harness the value of health data, the concept of Health Data Bank (HDB) is proposed. In this study, HDB is defined as an integrated health data service institution, which bears no “ownership” of health data and operates health data under the principal– agent model. This study first comprehensively reviews the main characters of blockchain and identifies the blockchain-based healthcare industry projects and startups in the areas of health insurance, pharmacy, and medical treatment. Then, we analyze the fundamental principles of HDB and point out four challenges faced by HDB’s sustainable development: (1) privacy protection and interoperability of health data; (2) data rights; (3) health data supervision; (4) and willingness to share health data. We also analyze the important benefits of blockchain adoption in HDB. Furthermore, three application scenarios including distributed storage of health data, smart-contractbased healthcare service mode, and consensus-algorithmbased incentive policy are proposed to shed light on HDBbased healthcare service mode. In the end, this study offers insights into potential research directions and challenges. Keywords Health Data Bank, blockchain, data assets, smart contract, incentive mechanism*
Received November 28, 2019; accepted August 25, 2020
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Jianxia GONG, Lindu ZHAO ( ) School of Economics & Management, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China E-mail: [email protected] This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71671039).
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Introduction
Blockchain is commonly considered a potential disruptive technology (Felin and Lakhani, 2018), which is a distributed ledger technology in the form of a distributed transactional database secured by cryptography and governed by a consensus mechanism (Constantinides et al., 2018) to verify transactions and to ensure the legitimacy of a transaction. These measures prevent double-spending, censorship, or fraud. Such conditions can create a trustworthy environment for high-value transactions in a distributed infrastructure without an intermediary (e.g., a bank, a service platform) (Risius and Spohrer, 2017). The price of Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology, increased dramatically to $900 in January 2017 since its launch in 2009, and it peaked to more than $19500 in December 2017 (Cheng et al., 2019). The rise in Bitcoin price came with growing interest in how blockchain technology could improve and perhaps revolutionize many industries, such as finance, energy, government, and healthcare (Ziolkowski et al., 2020). A number
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