  Data privacy refers to ensuring that users keep control over access to
information, whereas data accessibility refers to ensuring that information
access is unconstrained. Conflicts between privacy and accessibility of data
are natural to occur, and healthcare is a domain in which they are particularly
relevant. In the present article, we discuss how blockchain technology, and
smart contracts, could help in some typical scenarios related to data access,
data management and data interoperability for the specific healthcare domain.
We then propose the implementation of a large-scale information architecture to
access Electronic Health Records (EHRs) based on Smart Contracts as information
mediators. Our main contribution is the framing of data privacy and
accessibility issues in healthcare and the proposal of an integrated blockchain
based architecture.
