A Secure and Scalable Data Source for Emergency Medical Care using Blockchain Technology

Emergency medical services universally get regarded as the essential part of the health care delivery system [1]. A relationship exists between the emergency patient death rate and factors such as the failure to access a patient's critical data and the time it takes to arrive at hospitals. Nearly thirty million Americans do not live within an hour of trauma care, so this poor access to trauma centers links to higher pre-hospital death rates in more than half of the United States [2]. So, we need to address the problem. In a patient care-cycle, loads of medical data items are born in different healthcare settings using a disparate system of records during patient visits. The ability for medical care providers to access a patient's complete picture of emergency-relevant medical data is critical and can significantly reduce the annual mortality rate. Today, the problem exists with a continuous recording system of the patient data between healthcare providers. In this paper, we've introduced a combination of secure file transfer methods/tools and blockchain technology as a solution to record patient Emergency relevant medical data as patient walk through from one clinic/medical facility to another, creating a continuous footprint of patient as a secure and scalable data source. So, ambulance crews can access and use it to provide high quality pre-hospital care. All concerns of medical record sharing and accessing like authentication, privacy, security, scalability and audibility, confidentiality has been considered in this approach.

I. Introduction

In a medical emergency situation, prior knowledge of a patient medical record can make a difference especially in life or death situation. However, with current medical record setting, it is difficult to access a patient’s medical history as caregivers who treat the patient in emergency situation don’t know where the patient emergency data is located and even if they know where they are, they may not have access to the relevant medical records. There have been many attempts to resolve the issue but no comprehensive solution exists as some healthcare providers use trusted third party solution to communicate and share patient data while others prefer to use cloud-based medical data storage and sharing. Among others, there has been an approach to use blockchain network as a medical data record management platform. In our approach, we use blockchain technology as a potential solution for emergency medical data management.