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IJIET 2019 Vol.9(7): 462-469 ISSN: 2010-3689
doi: 10.18178/ijiet.2019.9.7.1247

An International Accreditation System for Healthcare Professionals Based on Blockchain

Jose Itamar M. de Souza Junior, Denise Sampaio de Araújo, Gentil Veloso Barbosa, and Patrick Letouze

Abstract—For health practitioners, accreditation processes are necessary for their career development. The importance is not restricted to attesting competencies and skills, it may even certify that some professionals are legally capable and authorized to perform a specific complex procedures, such as kidney transplantation. For example, physicians are crossing national borders with their practice, especially in Europe, and patients are becoming more demanding, thus in need of reliable information regarding health professionals. In this context, we propose a scenario to exemplify and to elucidate an emerging problem, that is, an opportunity. Let us consider that a group of national societies on transplantation biology and medicine decides to create an International Accreditation System for health professionals. The system would be a decentralized institution composed of multiple organizations, because accreditation is about trustworthiness, which naturally suggests the use of blockchain technology. Hence, in this work, we propose the use of blockchain and service design in healthcare, as fundamentals for the conceptual design of an international accreditation system for health professionals. Additionally, this work may be understood as a strategy for modeling, designing and developing healthcare systems based on blockchain technology.

Index Terms—Accreditation, blockchain, healthcare service, professional society, service design.

Jose Itamar M. de Souza Junior and Denise Sampaio de Araújo are with the Graduate Program of Health and Science Education, “Universidade Federal do Tocantins” (Federal University of Tocantins), Palmas/TO CEP 77.006-492, Brazil (e-mail: jhoseju@gmail.com, denisesamara@yahoo.com.br).
Gentil Veloso Barbosa and Patrick Letouze are with the “Universidade Federal do Tocantins” (Federal University of Tocantins), Graduate Program of Health and Science Education, and Graduate Program of Computational Modeling of Systems, Palmas/TO CEP 77.001-090, Brazil (e-mail: gentilveloso@gmail.com, patrick.letouze@gmail.com).

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Cite: Jose Itamar M. de Souza Junior, Denise Sampaio de Araújo, Gentil Veloso Barbosa, and Patrick Letouze, "An International Accreditation System for Healthcare Professionals Based on Blockchain," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 9, no. 7, pp. 462-469, 2019.

Copyright © 2019 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

General Information

  • ISSN: 2010-3689 (Online)
  • Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Inf. Educ. Technol.
  • Frequency: Monthly
  • DOI: 10.18178/IJIET
  • Editor-in-Chief: Prof. Dr. Steve Thatcher
  • Managing Editor: Ms. Nancy Y. Liu
  • Abstracting/ Indexing: Scopus (CiteScore 2022: 2.0), INSPEC (IET), UGC-CARE List (India), CNKI, EBSCO, Google Scholar
  • E-mail: ijiet@ejournal.net

 

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