Modernizing Healthcare by Using Blockchain

Electronic health record (EHR) systems are designed and deployed to store data accurately and to capture the state of a patient across time, and they have been one of the major drivers to advance care in the last decade. However, the EHR is not eligible in supporting a model that is beyond episodic visits, nor the idea of an integrated care plan that all care team members can view and contribute to. On the other hand, the concept of a longitudinal record and the idea of a "smart care plan" are key factors for paving the way toward Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory (P4-medicine), which arguably will be in a near future the only effective and sustainable approach for pandemics and "silent" chronic diseases. At the current state-of-the-art, the HL7 FHIR standard and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are two very promising areas of research and development in the context of health information management, and a proper synergy among their approaches, concepts and tools could overcome the limitations of EHR systems, giving rise to the hub of the IT infrastructure for P4-medicine. This chapter explores the potential and challenges of integrating the FHIR standard into DLTs, also through a concrete example of implementation.