An Application of Mobile based Secure Medical Record Sharing

Today, electronic medical records (EMRs) are generally kept in centralized databases. Hospitals generally have control over EMRs. It is a problem that EMRs are not kept decentralized and patients cannot manage their data. It is important that EMRs are kept confidential and secure in databases that can be accessed remotely. In addition, control of a patient’s EMR should rest with the patient themselves.In this study, a model for sharing, accessing and storing EMRs without security vulnerabilities was proposed. The three operations (data saving, data sharing and hash control) for the proposed model are implemented. Encryption and hash algorithms with strong keys are used for secure data communication in the operations. A mobile application was developed according to this model. In the developed application, the entire authority over a patient EMR lies with the patient. EMRs are stored encrypted in the document-based database. The EMR digests are stored in the blockchain. In this way, a blockchain and a distributed database are successfully used together in the proposed model. The potential impact of the study is remarkable, as it provides data security without the need for a central authority.