Blockchain-based Incident Reporting System for Patient Safety and Quality in Healthcare

Adverse events pose significant threats to patient safety and quality in healthcare worldwide. To understand how and why such events occur, incident reporting and investigation gained an imperative role in healthcare operations. Therefore, healthcare organizations and national health services have implemented local and national-level incident reporting systems (IRSs) to enhance the quality of reporting. However, the literature indicates that reporting practice is insufficient due to underreporting, incomplete incident data, privacy issues, unreliable classifications, the delay from the time of reporting to the investigation, and lack of feedback to reporters. The situation can be potentially improved by exploiting the blockchain technology that has inherent and unique features, such as security, data integrity, and provenance. To shed light on this, we first develop a blockchain-based reporting system showing how incident data can be reported and shared through a secure and trusted distributed ledger. Further, we present algorithms that depict the various interactions among the stakeholders in the reporting network. We finally demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution through the cost and security analysis while ensuring security, integrity, transparency, and traceability among stakeholders. This chapter also discusses potential challenges and suggests future research to provide significant insights for the implementation of the blockchain-based incident reporting system in practice.