Desenvolvimento de uma plataforma de partilha de processos clínicos baseada em Blockchain caso de estudo: Sistema Nacional de Saúde

Abstract

The National Health System (NHS) is an entity governed by MISAU, created in 1991 by the Government of Mozambique, with the aim of promoting the health of all national citizens. To achieve these goals, one of the healthcare professionals’ essential tool is the patient's medical history, which describes patient's clinical history during the different stages of his life. Hence, the importance of enabling the construction of a medical history which is complete, incorruptible and fully accessible by any health professional from any Health Unit (HU) of the NHS whenever necessary. For this, the patient’s medical history need to be shared between the HU of the NHS. The sharing of patient’s medical history contributes to improve the accuracy of diagnoses and promotes the progress of the medical research. However, ensuring the privacy and integrity of this information and fine-grained access control are crucial issues to be taken into account when sharing patient’s medical history. As a distributed architecture with decentralized and tamper-proof features, blockchain provides a new way to secure the personal medical record sharing system. This is a transparent system, as every participant can consult transactions that have already been carried out and registered; reliable, as validation is through encryption methods and consensus among members; and high availability, as it operates in a peer-to-peer network with a database distributed among the network nodes. In addition, its features still provide the pillars of information security. Thus, the present work culminates with the development of a blockchain-based prototype, for patient’s medical history sharing between the HU of the NHS, where patients are included for access control, guaranteeing their privacy. High availability of the patient’s medical history from any HU, incorruptibility, privacy and authenticity of the information are the expected results