Previously submitted to: JMIR Formative Research (no longer under consideration since Nov 11, 2025)
Date Submitted: Apr 1, 2025
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Future of Blockchain Technology Integration in Data Security and Interoperability in Kenya's Electronic Health Records (EHR)
ABSTRACT
Background:
Medical data exchange in the healthcare industry is pivotal to improving the quality of healthcare services and the intelligence of healthcare systems. Sharing medical data is crucial for advanced research, necessitating data availability, accessibility, and consistency. As healthcare facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, adopt Electronic Health Records, a key concern arises in data sharing as healthcare records are often fragmented across different hospitals, and current data-sharing mechanisms lack an effective and transparent auditing process, making it difficult to ensure accountability and traceability in medical data exchange. Also, inadequate security measures for healthcare data lead to serious privacy concerns.
Objective:
The study aims to investigate the current challenges of EHR technology in Kenyan Healthcare Systems and explore the potential of blockchain technology in addressing EHR challenges.
Methods:
The research utilized a descriptive research design, exploring the challenges of current EHR systems and opportunities for integrating blockchain technology. Slovin’s formula was used to determine the sample size of 133 participants, and simple random sampling was utilized. A survey was distributed electronically to diverse staff within the Healthcare institution, including nurses, doctors, health administrators, and IT professionals.
Results:
Findings demonstrate that a lack of training and poor interoperability are key challenges in the EHR system, at 41.9% and 30.2%, respectively. Kenya's healthcare system has low familiarity with blockchain technology, with only 18.9% reporting familiarity and 41.9% somewhat familiar. 74.4% of respondents acknowledged the potential of blockchain technology to improve data security, and 62.8% cited the potential of the technology to achieve interoperability between hospitals.
Conclusions:
The decentralization, persistence, anonymity, auditability, cryptography, and transparency of blockchain technology provide an opportunity to address data security and Interoperability in Kenya's EHR systems.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.