Browsing by Author "Zhang, Luxia"

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    Promoting TEFCA with Blockchain Technology: A Decentralized Approach to Patient-centered Healthcare Data Management
    (AMIA, 2023) Zhuang, Yan; Zhang, Luxia; Biomedical Engineering and Informatics, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
    The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) is a framework consisting of seven principles designed to create a secure and seamless health information exchange system across various healthcare settings. The ultimate goal of TEFCA is to facilitate public health surveillance, increase interoperability, promote data sharing, and ensure patient-centered healthcare data management. While the implementation of these principles is challenging, blockchain technology, with its unique features such as transparency, auditability, immutability, and anonymity, can provide a promising solution to the development of TEFCA. This article delves into the potential of blockchain technology to promote TEFCA design. By providing an immutable and transparent ledger, blockchain ensures data integrity, openness, and patient privacy. Overall, the use of blockchain technology can help address the challenges of implementing TEFCA principles and promote patient empowerment and control over their health data, improve data interoperability, and enhance healthcare quality.
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    Self-sovereign identity empowered non-fungible patient tokenization for health information exchange using blockchain technology
    (Elsevier, 2023-05) Zhuang, Yan; Shyu, Chi-Ren; Hong, Shenda; Li, Pengfei; Zhang, Luxia; Biomedical Engineering and Informatics, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
    Background: Patient tokenization is a novel approach that allows anonymous patient-level linkage across healthcare facilities, minimizing the risk of breaching protected health information in health information exchange (HIE). Most patient tokenization is the centralized approach that is unable to address data security concerns fundamentally. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), which are non-transferable cryptographic assets on the blockchain, have the potential to provide secure, decentralized, and trustworthy patient tokenization. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is a user-centric approach to verify the ownership of NFTs in a decentralized manner. Methods We have developed a blockchain architecture that contains four modules: (1) Creation module for NFTs creation, (2) Linkage module to link the local patients' accounts to their NFTs, (3) Authentication module that allows patients to permit healthcare providers to access their token, and (4) Exchange module, which involves the HIE process and the validation of the legitimacy of the token through SSI. Results A case study has been conducted on the proposed architecture. Over 3 million transactions have been completed successfully with a blockchain validation and written time of 1.17 s on average. A stability test has also been conducted with a higher throughput of 200 transactions per second running for an hour with an average transaction processing time of 1.42 s. Conclusions This study proposed a blockchain architecture that achieves SSI-enabled NFT-based patient tokenization. Our architecture design, implementation, and case studies have demonstrated the feasibility and potential of NFT with SSI to establish a secure, transparent, and patient-centric identity management and HIE.