Unified medical data management on the cloud: leveraging blockchain for multi-source integration

The evolution of healthcare technology has enabled widespread collection of medical data from multiple sources. Despite their potential to transform patient care and provide significant healthcare insights, the integration of these varied data sources poses significant challenges, particularly concerning data privacy, compliance, and practicalities of data merging. Our study proposed a sophisticated framework designed to address these challenges, focusing primarily on the efficient merging and management of anonymized medical data from a multitude of healthcare providers. It specifically targets the issues of data duplication and inconsistencies that are prevalent in large-scale data aggregation. A notable feature of our approach is the application of the blockchain technology. By leveraging the inherent attributes of decentralization and security found in blockchains, our framework facilitates the seamless merging of data while preserving its integrity and patient anonymity. In this framework, real patient identities are substituted by irreversible synthetic global identifiers to provide robust privacy protection. These records are then maintained in a distributed ledger, mimicking the mechanics of a blockchain database where user identities are concealed. Consequently, anonymized medical records associated with a global identity can be securely housed within a blockchain cloud. This approach offers valuable benefits to a broad range of health care stakeholders. Data analysts stand to gain secure, anonymized, and interconnected data for improved research quality, while medical practitioners can benefit from efficient access to aggregated patient data, enabling a more holistic view of patient health, and consequently, more informed care.