Semantic Interoperability in Electronic Health Record System Based on Blockchain Technology: a Survey

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) represents a patient's medical information and treatment history in a digital format. Patients’ data are heterogeneous, divided, and distributed among healthcare organizations. Thus, these data help enhance the quality of healthcare services and improve diagnosis efficiency. Designing an EHR system requires many considerations, such as security, privacy, scalability, integrity, information confidentiality, and interoperability. Healthcare parties involved can internally exchange patient data, but there is an issue in sharing, interpreting, and processing it semantically with other healthcare providers. In this context, blockchain enables the sharing of clinic data in a robust, transparent, and interoperable way between different healthcare providers. It provides secure and scalable sharing of the patient’s health data, expediting coordinated care. This paper provides a systematic review focused on semantic interoperability in EHR systems based on blockchain technology. The objective is to identify the current challenges, solutions, and limitations related to this topic.