Blockchain for Giving Patients Control over their Medical Records

Abstract

Personal health records (PHRs) are valuable assets to individuals because they enable them to integrate and manage their medical data. A PHR is an electronic application through which patients can manage their health information. Giving patients control over their medical data offers an advantageous realignment of the doctor-patient dynamic. However, today's PHR management systems fall short of giving reliable, traceable, trustful, and secure patients control over their medical data, which poses serious threats to their authenticity and accuracy. Moreover, most of the current approaches and systems leveraged for managing PHR are centralized that not only make medical data sharing difficult but also poses a risk of single point of failure problem. In this paper, we propose Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts to give patients control over their data in a manner that is decentralized, immutable, transparent, traceable, trustful, and secure. The proposed system employs decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems (IPFS), proxy re-encryption, and trusted reputation-based oracles to securely fetch, store, and share patients' medical data. We present algorithms along with their full implementation details. We evaluate the proposed smart contracts using two important performance metrics, such as cost and correctness. Furthermore, we provide security analysis and discuss the generalization aspects of our solution. We outline the limitations of the proposed approach. We make the smart contract source code publicly available on Github.

Blockchain-Based Electronic Health Records Management: A Comprehensive Review and Future Research Direction

“…Authors in 5 papers [50], [105], [112], [122], [131] have considered the issue, but they haven't mentioned about the data storage services. In addition, there were 7 papers where authors have chosen the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) as a medium of data storage and then linked the address with the blockchain [59], [62], [66], [77], [84], [88], [90], [115]. Among all the papers, only 3 proposed to use Amazon Cloud services before uploading data into the blockchain network [63], [67], [101].…”

“…, 2016 [11], [49], [51], [55], [73], [90], [93], [100], [101], [125], [138], [140]. Researchers used PoA in 8 papers [50], [64], [66], [68], [82], [106], [108], [114], whereas PBFT was suggested in 7 research papers [60], [63], [71], [87], [98], [104], [132].…”

Application-Level Interoperability for Blockchain Networks

“…Moreover, depending on the design of the EMR storage, the verifier may need to process the patient medical records to translate them from the patient to the doctor. For instance, a patient-centered blockchain system may require Proxy Re-encryption (PRE) processing of the EMR to convert the records from being encrypted by the public key of the patient to being encrypted by the public key of the doctor [30].…”

Privacy Preservation of User Identity in Contact Tracing for COVID-19-Like Pandemics Using Edge Computing

“…They include interoperability with existing systems, adoption, and scalability challenges, with emphasis on the power consumption issues of using blockchain. Madine et al [40] proposed a decentralized, integrated, blockchainbased, peer-to-peer file storage system to share medical data.…”