Swasthya - An EHR Built on Blockchain

Abstract

An Electronic Health Record System (EHR) is a systematic collection of electronically-stored health records and information of a patient and population in a digital format. It is typically shared among healthcare stakeholders. While a lot of hospitals in developing nations still lack the facilities that are required to shift to an EHR system, its adoption has been on the rise globally. The traditional EHR systems however face a lot of problems. These problems are majorly related to privacy, security, and ease of use. The records are entirely controlled by the hospitals that have created them. To overcome such a system, the use of a decentralized system to store data is required. The project proposes a system built on top of a Blockchain Network which allows hospitals and patients across the world to be connected to each other. Blockchain has been an emerging technology for a few years now. The key features of blockchain which attract most developers are its immutability (data cannot be changed), decentralization (data is not centrally stored), transparency (data is uniform whenever it is accessed), and distributed ledger (data distributed over various computing machines).