The Personal Health Dossier: A proposed decentralized personal health record system using verifiable credentials

Health information systems are continuously evolving to meet the changing business models, regulatory environment and needs of users. Today, these systems are changing to realize a patient-centric approach to improve health outcomes and establish greater access and autonomy over health information. Verifiable credential technology will become an essential part of the move to private and secure patient-centric interoperable health information systems. The widespread adoption of mobile devices has opened up the ability to store a patient’s personal health record at the edge of the system. In this type of decentralized architecture, the patient is the locus of their health data and they gain agency over who they grant access to their data. The data that the patient holds is a key to meaningful interoperability between siloed systems. The authors present a novel architecture based on a secure, patient-centric, interoperable design using verifiable credentials to realize these objectives.