A Patient-Centric EHR Management System using Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

The sharing of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has significant importance in healthcare. Cloud-based EHR sharing schemes have been used extensively to share patient records among various healthcare organizations. However, the centralization of the cloud may have an impact on the privacy and confidentiality of patient's medical data. The objective of this paper is to develop a Patient-centric EHR Management System using Ethereum Blockchain provides fine-grained access control with efficient EHR sharing to protect the security and privacy of patient EHR. We have employed an off-chain network Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum blockchain, wherein encrypted data is stored off-chain and its metadata is saved on the Ethereum blockchain. To achieve a secure distributed trustworthy access policy, we proposed an Ethereum smart contract-based patient-centered access control. Where patients have full control of their EHR allowing them to grant and refuse access to the records.