Enabling care continuity using a digital health wallet

Abstract

Clinical records capture the temporal, participatory, and interventional details of the care provision process. The exchange of these records plays a critical role in care continuity. Recently, there has been increasing attention on health data privacy and confidentiality which translates to questions on ownership and accessibility of clinical records. Traditional approaches to remedy this stand the risk of reducing the accessibility of these records, making care continuity across facilities more difficult. This poses a need for mechanisms that would enable the secure exchange of health data without adversely affecting the access to clinical records. This paper presents the Digital Health Wallet (DHW); a blockchain-enabled system that allows seamless clinical workflow orchestration and patient-mediated data exchange through consent management in a privacy-preserving manner. We conducted a preliminary test to benchmark the performance of DHW in resource-constrained healthcare facilities in developing countries.