Blockchain-based Patient-Centric Healthcare Architecture: A Secure and Efficient Approach for Medical Data Sharing

Abstract

Healthcare data is increasing in amount and complexity with the advent of technological advancements like wearable devices are capturing continuous health data to track chronic diseases such as diabetes. Trust-less centralized servers manage and control such data, raising concerns on privacy and security. A decentralized, permissioned blockchain-based approach can potentially give patients more control over medical data. In this paper, a blockchain-based patient-centric healthcare architecture is proposed to address the concerns of privacy, interoperability, data fragmentation, data ownership by centralized servers, data integrity, data access and data sharing. Patients’ diabetic data can only be accessed as per their agreed-upon access policy given their consent which is implemented using Ethereum smart contracts to ensure controlled exchange of sensitive data among various stakeholders. The smart contracts were tested in Truffle to validate the accuracy of their logic. A hybrid model is employed for data storage, that combines MongoDB, as the off-chain secure database and IPFS technologies for on-chain storage. The architecture is designed to be integrated with existing Electronic Health Records (EHRs) systems, promoting efficient and secure data sharing in the healthcare industry.