The objective of this GTRI HIVE $25K seed grant project was to develop a decentralized system to facilitate patient-directed provider-to-provider electronic medical record sharing. This required me to solve two related problems: (1) patient matching across EHRs, given the use of inconsistent identifiers; and (2) data transfer in the (potential) absence of provider-to-provider joint database access.
The prototype I developed involves representing patients, healthcare providers, and patient-designated stakeholders as nodes on a blockchain network, conducting pairwise cryptographic handshakes, and then allowing them to interact with a smart contract that resembles an escrow account, to facilitate patient-directed provider-to-provider record sharing in the absence of universal patient IDs.
