Designing a Unified Healthcare Data System with Blockchain and Cryptography

The majority of public and private healthcare data systems across the globe are proprietary, making it difficult to coordinate and share data between medical institutions on different systems. For the United States, a technically and economically advanced nation, patients still face significant issues with healthcare data sharing, which contribute to inefficiencies in the healthcare system. Friction in data sharing is also prevalent in developing nations like India, where the lack of shareability of patient data leads to redundant tests and unnecessarily high healthcare costs. To improve the integrity and shareability of patient data, we propose a Unified Healthcare Data System, built with blockchain and cryptography. Under this system, patients are in control of their data, and can choose to share their data with doctors and institutions without traditional barriers. To ensure data integrity, blockchain is used to provide immutability and data ownership while cryptography is used to encrypt patient data and implement permissioned access. In this paper, we provide a working implementation of Unified Healthcare Data System and expand on the viability, impact, and evolution of this blockchain-based healthcare data system.