The Valkyrie project aims to develop “”a distributed service-oriented architecture for coordinated healthcare services”. It is running from 2021-27, funded by the Norwegian government and led by the Norwegian eHealth Research Centre in Tromsø.
John Chelsom presented a paper about the Valkyrie architecture at the Medical Informatics Europe conference in Athens (MIE 2024), entitled “Federated Electronic Health Records Using a Blockchain”. The paper describes the creation of a federated health record for mental health practitioners, where encrypted tokens are generated by source EHR systems whenever a new event is added. These tokens hold meta data about the event which is sufficient to identify the patient, describe the clinical context and locate the event in the source EHR,
The tokens are passed to the Valkyrie gateway where they are added to a centralized, permissioned blockchain – one blockchain for each patient registered with Valkyrie. During a clinical encounter with a patient, the mental health practitioner has access to the outline of a virtual health record for the patient, formed from the blockchain of encrypted tokens for that patient. To view a specific event in the health record the location information in the token is used to retrieve a read-only rendition of the event from the source EHR system.
