The use of Blockchain in Swiss Healthcare
I Simon · Harvard Dataverse · 2022
The digital revolution of Swiss healthcare just starts with the introduction of the electronic patient dossier (EPD) providing more control over health data for patients. At the same time, the risk for misuse and cyberattacks of health data that is available electronically is increasing. Even in the healthcare sector, there has been a lot of hype about the potential application of blockchain. Applying a design science approach, this paper investigates on the design and evaluation of blockchain in the Swiss healthcare to increase the security of electronic health records of patients and proposes system architectures combined with the existing EPD infrastructure. The system architecture comprises two distinctive layers: (1) the focus on data integrity of health data using blockchain with the existing EPD infrastructure; (2) extending the system architecture with decentralized storage to increase security and availability of health data. For practitioners, both proposals present validated system architectures for the Swiss healthcare. For this research, 16 qualitative interviews from the Swiss healthcare and blockchain experts were conducted.