A Blockchain based Data Sharing Mechanism using The Graph Indexing Tool for Medical Industries

Data access is equally important as the storage, with the same security, privacy and authenticity in any decentralized system. The sharing of medical records helps in effective treatment of the patient, while quicker accessibility of information improves the accuracy of diagnosis. In this study, the Blockchain and the IPFS technology has been used to securely store the medical records, which makes the system completely decentralized. By utilizing the Blockchain and IPFS systems, the storage in the proposed methodology is sufficiently secure. Subsequently, records access needs to be quicker, easier and most importantly, completely decentralized. Indexing is a crucial element in record access, which has to be as simple as the index of any book. The blockchain can perform a linear, block-by-block search if need to find any record in it. This is a time-consuming process as there are many transactions and blocks involved. A powerful indexing strategy that breaks the linear searching process and creates an index is therefore essential to reduce the time needed to access any transaction or record. A decentralized indexing and querying protocol named ‘The Graph’ was employed for medical record indexing in this study. ‘The Graph’ accessing and indexing tool provides the complete decentralized system with fast and easy access. The proposed method makes the process simpler and more developer-friendly to access record from blockchain. Once the index created, accessing becomes easier and faster. Decentralized apps (dApps) utilize it as a crucial middleware layer because it offers a number of capabilities and elements.