Privacy-preserving roadmap for medical data-sharing systems

Despite advances in research and the deployment of digital healthcare enablement technology, data exchange in medical healthcare systems remains a challenge. Medical organisations have traditionally relied on a variety of third parties, including IT businesses, medical applications, and many others, to connect their services to their clients (patients) or other healthcare providers and to communicate with healthcare regulators and legislative bodies. On the other hand, the challenge of medical data-sharing systems is to provide a robust, practical framework that takes into account several complex factors between interacting healthcare entities, such as the heterogeneous aspect of communication mechanisms, which hinders technical interoperability in the near future and renders medical data-sharing system implementations impossible. This research synthesises the interoperability components in medical data-sharing systems. The study then analyses their accompanying technical interoperability issues and relates them to prevalent cyber security attacks that inhibit the realisation of technological interoperability from a privacy-preserving technological aspect, thereby rendering medically scalable data-sharing platforms practically impossible. We explore how recent trends in data-sharing systems, such as blockchain and federated learning, could potentially drive the roadmap to the realisation of implementable and ubiquitous medical data-sharing systems among medical and healthcare organisations, therefore, preserving the privacy of medical data-sharing users.