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Background: Acute stroke care demands fast procedures performed through the collaboration of multiple professionals across multiple organizations. Cloud computing and the wide adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) enable health care systems to improve data availability and facilitate sharing among professionals. However, designing a secure and privacy-preserving EMR cloud-based application is challenging because it must dynamically control the access to the patient's EMR according to the needs for data during treatment., Objective: We developed a prototype of a secure EMR cloud-based application. The application explores the security features offered by the eHealth cloud-based framework created by the Advanced Secure Cloud Encrypted Platform for Internationally Orchestrated Solutions in Health Care Horizon 2020 project. This study aimed to collect impressions, challenges, and improvements for the prototype when applied to the use case of secure data sharing among acute care teams during emergency treatment in the Netherlands., Methods: We conducted 14 semistructured interviews with medical professionals with 4 prominent roles in acute care: emergency call centers, ambulance services, emergency hospitals, and general practitioner clinics. We used in-depth interviews to capture their perspectives about the application's design and functions and its use in a simulated acute care event. We used thematic analysis of interview transcripts. Participants were recruited until the collected data reached thematic saturation., Results: The participants' perceptions and feedback are presented as 5 themes identified from the interviews: current challenges (theme 1), quality of the shared EMR data (theme 2), integrity and auditability of the EMR data (theme 3), usefulness and functionality of the application (theme 4), and trust and acceptance of the technology (theme 5). The results reinforced the current challenges in patient data sharing during acute stroke care. Moreover, from the user point of view, we expressed the challenges of adopting the Advanced Secure Cloud Encrypted Platform for Internationally Orchestrated Solutions in Health Care Acute Stroke Care application in a real scenario and provided suggestions for improving the proposed technology's acceptability., Conclusions: This study has endorsed a system that supports data sharing among acute care professionals with efficiency, but without compromising the security and privacy of the patient. This explorative study identified several significant barriers to and improvement opportunities for the future acceptance and adoption of the proposed system. Moreover, the study results highlight that the desired digital transformation should consider integrating the already existing systems instead of requesting migration to a new centralized system., (©Marcela Tuler de Oliveira, Lúcio Henrik Amorim Reis, Henk Marquering, Aeilko H Zwinderman, Sílvia Delgado Olabarriaga. Originally published in JMIR Formative Research (https://formative.jmir.org), 23.12.2022.)

The enormous pressure of the increasing case numbers experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a variety of novel digital systems designed to provide solutions to unprecedented challenges in public health. The field of algorithmic contact tracing, in particular, an area of research that had previously received limited attention, has moved into the spotlight as a crucial factor in containing the pandemic. The use of digital tools to enable more robust and expedited contact tracing and notification, while maintaining privacy and trust in the data generated, is viewed as key to identifying chains of transmission and close contacts, and, consequently, to enabling effective case investigations. Scaling these tools has never been more critical, as global case numbers have exceeded 100 million, as many asymptomatic patients remain undetected, and as COVID-19 variants begin to emerge around the world. In this context, there is increasing attention on blockchain technology as a part of systems for enhanced digital algorithmic contact tracing and reporting. By analyzing the literature that has emerged from this trend, the common characteristics of the designs proposed become apparent. An archetypal system architecture can be derived, taking these characteristics into consideration. However, assessing the utility of this architecture using a recognized evaluation framework shows that the added benefits and features of blockchain technology do not provide significant advantages over conventional centralized systems for algorithmic contact tracing and reporting. From our study, it, therefore, seems that blockchain technology may provide a more significant benefit in other areas of public health beyond contact tracing., (©Moritz Platt, Anton Hasselgren, Juan Manuel Román-Belmonte, Marcela Tuler de Oliveira, Hortensia De la Corte-Rodríguez, Sílvia Delgado Olabarriaga, E Carlos Rodríguez-Merchán, Tim Ken Mackey. Originally published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (http://publichealth.jmir.org), 06.04.2021.)