Smart Contract-based Consensus Building for Collaborative Medical Decision-Making

Abstract

Medical decision-making is moving away from the traditional one-off dyadic encounter between the patient and physician, and transitioning towards a more inclusive, shared decision-making process that also considers the inputs from other stakeholders. This ensures that a patient's decision is not only based on a medical opinion, but also includes other considerations such as impact on family members, legal and financial implications, and experiences of patients in similar situations. However, given the sensitive nature of health data and decisions, there are several challenges associated with safeguarding the privacy, security and consent of all contributors and assuring the integrity of the process. We propose a collaborative medical decision-making platform that uses a consensus building mechanism implemented using Blockchain-based Smart Contracts to address some of the above challenges, thereby giving the participants confidence that both the decision-making process and the outcome(s) can be trusted. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation using the private Ethereum Blockchain to demonstrate practicability.