Blockchain-supported health registry: The claim for a personal health trajectory traceability and how it can be achieved

The digitalization of health processes is a reality. Each time, there are more services and institutions generating and interacting with the health data of a patient. This put in manifest some deficiencies of actual health systems, such as the need for data no longer revolve around the institutions that generate them and start to revolve around the users or patients to whom they belong. Otherwise, patients will end up losing focus and control of their data, which is distributed among different information systems. To address this, many researchers around the world have proposed software solutions that integrate a patient’s data into a global view, even though it is still stored in a distributed way in the systems that generate it. However, the mere integration of data does not allow a patient to have real knowledge of the entire life cycle of her different records. To this end, data integration solutions must go a step further and convert the structure that maintains the overall view of a patient’s health, her Personal Health Trajectory, into a registry ensuring the traceability of the patient’s health. As a result, patients will have a real understanding of everything that surrounds their health data and true patient-centered healthcare systems will be one step closer.