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).
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).