Blockchain-Based Electronic Medical Records System with Smart Contract and Consensus Algorithm in Cloud Environment

Abstract

The blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology that works on the precept of “write-once-read-only.” In a blockchain, pieces of information are arranged in the form of blocks, and these blocks are linked together using the hash value of previous blocks. The blocks in a blockchain mechanism are appended only, which means that once information is stored in a block and it cannot be changed; no one tampers the block’s content. The traditional electronic medical records (EMRs) based system stores the patients’ information in a local database or server, which provides centralization of information, and traditional EMRs are more centric on the health providers. So, security and sharing of patients’ information are difficult tasks in the traditional EMR system. The blockchain mechanism has the potential to resolve these existing problems. Due to the appended-only-ledger principle and decentralization of blocks between the network participants, blockchain technology is suited to the EMR system. In this article, first, we discuss all the existing EMR systems and discuss their drawbacks. Keeping all the drawbacks in our mind, we propose a blockchain-based medical record system that utilizes clouding technology for storage purposes. Furthermore, we have designed a smart contract and consensus algorithm for our proposed EMR. Our system only uses a permissioned blockchain model so that only verified and authenticated users can generate their data and participate in the data-sharing system.