Secure Data-Sharing Among Healthcare Organisations in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The healthcare sector is suffering from the inefficiencies in handling its data. Many patients and healthcare organisations are frustrated by the numerous hurdles to obtaining current real-time patient information that are leading to delays in treatment. The healthcare sector’s attention has been drawn to blockchain technology for a part of the solution, especially after this technology was successfully applied in the financial sector to improve the security of transactions. The lack of data-sharing in the healthcare sector is considered a significant issue worldwide. This research focuses on the gap by investigating the benefits of using blockchain at the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia. The study achieves this by providing a detailed analysis of the healthcare sector and evaluating how blockchain technology improves data-sharing in a more secure way. This research proposes a framework that identifies the factors that will provide data-sharing among healthcare organisations using blockchain. The framework has three categories: healthcare systems factors; security factors; and blockchain factors. These were identified by critically reviewing published studies together with factors from the relevant industrial standards within the context of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). A triangulation technique was used to achieve reliable results in three steps: a literature review; expert review; and questionnaires. This provided a comprehensive picture of the research topic, validating and confirming the results. To construct the framework the factors of the framework were comprehensively studied and extracted from the literature, then analysed, cleared of duplicates and categorised. Once the framework had been developed, to review and confirm it a study was carried out with healthcare IT specialists and blockchain experts. The expert review findings confirmed that all the proposed factors were important, and suggested recategorising one factor and removing another. After revising the proposed framework according to the expert review and recommendations, a questionnaire was distributed to healthcare IT specialists and blockchain experts in various organisations. Its results were analysed via a one-sample t-test and its data integrity analysed using Cronbach’s alpha, showing that all the factors are statistically significant. The confirmed framework has been based on literature and expert reviews and is supported by a practitioner survey. The framework can be used to inform decision-makers and the Ministry of Health about the factors that will provide data-sharing among healthcare organisations using blockchain. A new instrument was developed. A total of 238 IT and blockchain experts in Saudi healthcare organisations used the instrument. It was developed using the framework to identify the factors that will provide data-sharing among healthcare organisations. The instrument was evaluated using two tests that examined the internal reliability and the validity tests. The results from the instrument were used to develop a model using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The resulting data clearly showed a good fit of the structural model and measurement analyses. The key outcomes of the validation study revealed that the factors were discovered to have a direct and statistically significant effect on the model. This specifies that the proposed model fits the data and applies to the KSA context. The contributions of this research are as follows: first, it developed a framework within the KSA context and, second, from the framework a data-sharing instrument was developed, the results of which were used to generate a structural equation model. Overall, the outcomes of this study are valuable information in terms of recommendations to experts and healthcare organisations. Simply put, these findings can assist data sharing and encourage the spread of this phenomenon across countries in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia.