A Cross-Blockchain Approach to Emergency Medical Information

Accessing a patient’s information across data sharing networks is a challenging task. For a client application to request a patient’s data, it has to first refer to a centralized repository for demographic information to identify the patient. Then the search will be continued for patients’ clinical and medical data that may exist in different centralized data sharing networks. This approach poses a risk on data availability especially in emergency instances because centralized data sources can be attractive targets for cyberattack (Peterson et al., J. Med. Syst. 63:425–432, 2016) or can be a single point of failure. Other problems can be data privacy and security associated with the centralized authority and governance of data (Wu and LaRue, Int. J. Nurs. Sci. 4:410–417, 2017). In this chapter, we introduce a cross-blockchain-based data search service that avoids centralized data risks. This search service consists of emergency data services that enable first responders to request and receive relevant emergency data across multiple Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) networks. It also allows first responders’ care reports to be sent back to the networks where patient’s data is retrieved from. Patients’ treatment data is recorded and updated on the ledger. We have implemented our approach by creating two HLF networks consisting of two hospitals and one client application, which enables first responders to look up a patient’s data and add the care report by connecting to these networks.