Health Record Management through Blockchain Technology

The world is moving towards progress, to achieve the desired progress, the world should have a healthy population and health records are the projections of an individual's health over time. The centralised approach of maintaining the health records lead to data breaches. According to 2017 Ponemon Cost of Data Breach Study, the cost of the data breach for healthcare organizations estimated to be $380 per record. According to 2016 Breach Barometer Report, 27,314,647 patient records were affected. So we moved towards institution-driven approach of record maintenance, which didn't make much difference with the previously existing one. Since the patient have no control over the data, the chances of data being misused is high. So we need a patient-centered approach which is completely decentralised, which can identify data thefts, prevent data manipulation, and patient has the right in access control. Blockchain Technology serves as a best solution to address all the problems and fulfill the needs. Blockchain being a decentralised and distributed ledger it can also impact on billing, record sharing, medical research, identify thefts and financial data crimes in days to come. Implementation of smart contracts in health care can simplify things even better. Where invoking, record creation and validation will be done on Blockchain. This paper highlights on the patient-driven model of record maintenance using Blockchain technology where smart contracts can be incorporated in future days making it more potential in data exchange. Finding its huge scope, hoping that more researches will be carried out and practically implemented.

I. Introduction

Better health is important to human happiness and the welfare of society. It plays a vital role in the economic progress of the nation. Ill health, casualty, emergencies occur every day and the diseases are expected to be diagnosed and treated. A health record is a collection of clinical data related to the patient's mental and physical health, gathered from different sources. Health record consists of a patient's medical history, examination, diagnosis, treatment, results of lab investigation, scanning reports, alerts like allergic to etc. These health records can be managed both manually and digitally.