A Privacy Preserving Framework for Health Records using Blockchain

Abstract

Electronic Health Records (EHR) is the electronic form of storing a patient's medical history. EHR contains patient’s data such as progress notes, medications, prescriptions, vital signs, scan reports and laboratory data. Transferring EHR over the internet improves the quality of health care and reduces medical costs. However, in the traditional system, the EHR are stored across different decentralised hospitals, making data sharing difficult and increasing the risk of patient privacy. A privacy-preserving framework for electronic health records using blockchain technology is implemented to address these issues. The patient has complete control over the EHR, and the patient can share their health records with doctors of various medical institutions. The privacy and security of the patient’s EHR are guaranteed by the verifiability and immutability property of the blockchain technology. The doctor upload the EHR, and it is encrypted using the SHA256 hashing algorithm and stored as a separate block. The patient shares the EHR with the doctor of any medical institution through the unique key shared via the doctor’s email. The doctor can access and update the EHR using the shared key. The block validation is done using Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm, which guarantees the privacy of the patient’s data. The proposed system based on the DPoS algorithm has considerabe reduction in resource utilisation, computational capacity, time, and cost for EHR transactions.