A Comparative Study of Ethereum-Based and Web2.0-Based Personal Health Record Systems

Abstract

The move from traditional healthcare to smart healthcare systems is greatly aided by current technology. It is now necessary that the patient retains ownership of his or her personal medical data, organizes it securely, and shares it with those who remain anonymous in the system. Transparency, security, and privacy of health data are three major drawbacks of conventional healthcare systems. Utilizing blockchain technology, which has several uses in the healthcare industry because of characteristics like decentralization (no need for a central authority), immutability, accountability, and openness, is one potential remedy for this. The proposed system allows patients to enter their medical data and access the doctor's prescription that has been uploaded to the platform. Registered doctors can access patient reports and provide feedback as necessary. To maintain privacy, both patients and doctors will remain anonymous to each other, and all data and activity will be encrypted and unchangeable. This ensures that the information remains secure and cannot be tampered with. In this study, we developed a blockchain-based system using Ethereum for storing personal health records and conducted a comparative analysis with SQL-based health record systems. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Ethereum-based system offers superior security and data privacy compared to traditional SQL-based systems. Moreover, the blockchain transactions were found to be 87% faster on average than transactions processed through traditional SQL databases according to our study.