Blockchain Solution to Electronic Healthcare Records

Abstract

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are very sensitive and private records that requires at most security and privacy. Because of lack of trustworthy and reliable health data sharing mechanisms, the majority of EHR data sharing is still done via mail. This impacts the proper treatment of patients and results in unwanted delays between participating organisations. The sharing sensitive health records via mail or physically results in various issues such as privacy, security and interoperability. As a decentralised framework, Blockchain provide cryptographic guarantees of information security, integrity, secrecy and smart contracts for access to data. Since EHR are a sensitive and private data, hence the paper proposed a system which uses permissioned blockchain solution for storing and sharing electronic healthcare records using the Hyperledger fabric framework. The proposed system allows the patients to have total control over their electronically generated medical records, and they are able to authorise doctors to examine and add new EHRs using grant and revoke access methods. The proposed system is inherently good in interoperability and secure due to nature of framework used and provided cryptoaraphic guarantee of non-tampering.