Patient Electronic Health Records Maintenance Using Blockchain

Even though blockchain has been a buzzword for a long time now, blockchain in healthcare is yet to take a big step in the real world. The benefits of having a distribution system to store patient records are immense. The hospitals now have a centralized architecture to store data which makes the system inflexible and inconvenient for the patients to organize their health records that can branch to n number of hospitals with numerous updates and changes. Medical faults are also a major drawback leading to unsuccessful medical attempts. Adding to this, patient data is very sensitive which calls for a more secure system like blockchain. There has been recent research based on these benefits of blockchain and in our proposed system, the blockchain system is entirely private reducing the risk of privacy as well as data breaches. Doctors can consult the patients after viewing their records on the blockchain and the patients can register for the same. Hence, it is a patient electronic health record system developed using the concept of blockchain. Traditional EHR-based systems are prone to data loss, security and immutability consensus over health records, gaped communication among constituted hospitals, among others. Blockchain has been developed as a decentralized technology that holds the promise to address the aforesaid facilities in EHR-based systems. We are working on first attempting to implement EHR using blockchain and then defining fine-grained access rules for network users to provide a high security vault.