Enabling Personal Health Trajectory systems by means of a blockchain federation

Many proposals have arisen to integrate a patient’s health information produced by different heterogeneous sources. Ones trying to physically integrate this information and others making interoperable the data that remain stored in current health systems. Interoperable approaches have become the preferred solutions because of data security and privacy constraints, and blockchain technology is currently being used for integrating distributed health data. However, despite many approaches for performing such integration, there are unresolved issues around them such as the definition of who should keep this data structure alive and who should manage access to it. This makes difficult for health institutions to keep the global vision of patient’s always up to date. This paper offers a new patient-centered solution to achieve a global view of patient health that we call Personal Health Trajectory (PHT), which makes use of the blockchains’ federation concept. We provide a reference implementation architecture of PHT that has been validated over a case study on 50 sociosanitary institutions with 1156 patients. We have obtained a delay of 2.87s in write operations and 0.16s in reading ones—regarding the separate interaction with each health institution, which is not significant with respect to the benefits obtained.