Toward a New Era of Smart and Secure Healthcare Information Exchange Systems: Combining Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence

Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE) is becoming a fundamental operation in current healthcare systems. In such systems, electronic health records (EHRs) are digitally stored inside each medical centers and, sometimes, are required to be shared between various healthcare facilities (HCFs). Indeed, sharing patient information is crucial and might be vulnerable to power outages, data misuse, privacy or security violations, and an audit trail. Hence, researchers have focused recently on cutting-edge technologies to develop secure HIE systems and ensure data privacy during transactions. Among such technologies, blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) occupy a vital role in researchers’ focuses and efforts to detect risky transactions in HIE systems, thus enhancing their security and privacy. While the blockchain allows HCFs to link to each other without requiring a central authority, AI models offer an additional security layer when sharing patient data between HCFs. This paper presents a survey about HIE systems, and the aim is two-fold: we first present the architecture of HIE systems along with their challenges; then, we categorize and classify the current state-the-art-techniques that show the potential of using blockchain and AI technologies in such systems.