Blockchain Based Electronic Health Record Management System for Data Integrity

Abstract

Integrity of electronic health record (EHR) is essential to prevent harm due to incorrect past treatment records of patients and to ensure improvement in patient health by correct medication and treatment. Generally, healthcare organizations manage such information in centralized systems which are prone to various cyber crimes like ransomeware, DDOS, etc. Blockchain technology has potential of sustaining the integrity of EHRs due to unique characteristics like collusion resistance, transaction visibility, tamperproof and security. The aim of this work is to develop EHR management system for data integrity using distributed ledger technology. This can prove to be a very useful tool to maintain integrity of EHRs for various purposes such as better diagnosis of patient, insurance claim, drug discovery, etc. Developed system permits healthcare organizations to send EHRs to the patient over blockchain network and also allows EHR requesters to access it with the consent of patient. In designed system, unique IDs are computed for each EHR by universally unique identifier (UUID), and the hash generation of each EHR block is performed using secure hash algorithm(SHA)-256. The designed model comprises four building modules which are EHR uploading, EHR mining, EHR addition and EHR retrieval. All four modules of the developed prototype are executed effectively, and few execution outcomes are illustrated in the result section. Execution results shows that developed system is appropriate for EHR management.