A Blockchain-Based Credibility Scoring Framework for Electronic Medical Records

Abstract

The use of electronic medical records (EMRs) has simplified the processing of patient data because the patient does not need to carry documents and can simply show an identity card to retrieve a complete medical record history. This digitization has revolutionized the medical sector, but two major challenges exist with online records: security and trust. Data stored on the Internet is not secure and requires an additional security framework to safeguard and maintain complete trust with the data. In this paper, a blockchain-based security framework is proposed to maintain the confidentiality of EMRs. This solution is also used to securely access the patient's records in any hospital-using the patient's public key as a universal identifier-and to obtain the medical record history of a patient much more quickly even during emergencies. The proposed framework also uses a credit score approach to monitor the credibility of the entities authorized to input data into the blockchain. In this study, the Etherium platform is used to simulate the blockchain, and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is used to store the EMRs. This approach improves trust with the uploaded data and reduces errors from the falsification of the data.