Blockchain Medical Data Sharing

Medical data sharing is increasingly becoming an integral part of modern healthcare management. Mobility of patients, healthcare financing, and changing modes of care require that health data pass from the institutions that generate the data to others that need it to support healthcare delivery outcomes. These factors lead to challenges that render the sharing arrangement necessary but vulnerable to attack by malicious users. The conventional paradigms of sharing do not include techniques for data control after access permissions are granted. Thus, the data exchange leaves patients at the risk of privacy breaches and institutions are exposed to punitive measures when protected health information in their care is compromised. Blockchain technology presents mechanisms to secure patients' data using cryptographically secure techniques with game‐theoretic models of behavior control. This chapter focuses on three paradigms of data sharing and ends with an exposition on some exceptional cases where the application of blockchain in medical data sharing has valuable contributions.