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 pose 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) and trusted reputation-based re-encryption 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. INDEX TERMS Blockchain, Ethereum, smart contracts, personal health records, healthcare, access control.

A Smart Contract-Based Dynamic Consent Management System for Personal Data Usage under GDPR

“…Rupasinghe et al [ 17 ] described a privacy-preserving consent model architecture using blockchain to facilitate patient-data acquisition for clinical data analysis. Blockchain-enabled data-sharing consent schemes have been proposed [ 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ] for controlling access to individual health data, where smart contracts are used to denote individual consent and allow requesters to seek and access health data. Table 2 reviews the schemes available in the literature, which are compared with our proposed solution.…”

Practical Medical Files Sharing Scheme Based on Blockchain and Decentralized Attribute-Based Encryption

“…Multiple hospitals can join together to form a con- Data Storage Center (DSC) is responsible for storing the patient's medical files. Some researchers have proposed that data can be encrypted and stored in the interplanetary file system IPFS, such as paper [7] and paper [24]. In this paper, the data storage is still designed to be symmetrically encrypted and stored in the corresponding database of the hospital which can be extended to IPFS in future work.…”

appXchain: 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].…”