With the increasing digitalization of health data, patients need to make informed decisions about the online sharing of their protected health information. This necessitates a robust technical infrastructure that enables patients to self-manage consent and the trusted exchange of this information across sharing entities. Unfortunately, current health information exchange systems in the U.S. are limited in both these regards. While there is recent work on digital patient consent management, there is limited work that provides effective solutions for patient self-management of consent. Further, interoperability issues in the way health information exchanges are currently architected and differences in regulations across localities exacerbate the challenges of consent management. In this research, we survey potential patients' willingness to self-manage healthcare-related consent. Having established the desire for consent self-management, we propose a solution that enables the seamless sharing of patient consent across different healthcare providers and health information exchanges. Specifically, we use a rigorous design science approach to create a blockchain-based, self-managed patient consent system and we evaluate the design through an instantiated prototype. The results of our study should be useful to researchers in healthcare information management as well as to practitioners designing consent management systems. Our research contributes to design science research with an innovative, rigorously evaluated, design principles-based artifact that addresses a critical problem of sharing protected health information.

随着健康数据的数字化程度不断提高，患者需要就在线共享其受保护的健康信息做出明智的决定。这需要强大的技术基础设施，使患者能够自我管理同意以及跨共享实体的可信信息交换。不幸的是，美国当前的健康信息交换系统在这两方面都受到限制。尽管最近在数字化患者同意管理方面开展了一些工作，但为患者自我管理同意提供有效解决方案的工作仍然有限。此外，目前健康信息交换方式中的互操作性问题以及各地法规的差异加剧了同意管理的挑战。在这项研究中，我们调查了潜在患者自我管理医疗保健相关同意的意愿。在建立了同意自我管理的愿望后，我们提出了一种解决方案，可以在不同的医疗保健提供者之间无缝共享患者同意和健康信息交换。具体来说，我们使用严格的设计科学方法来创建基于区块链的自我管理的患者同意系统，并通过实例化原型评估设计。我们的研究结果应该对医疗保健信息管理的研究人员以及设计同意书的从业者有用管理系统。我们的研究通过创新的、严格评估的、基于设计原则的工件为设计科学研究做出贡献，该工件解决了共享受保护的健康信息的关键问题。