Medical Records Management Using Distributed Ledger and Storage

Abstract

In the last decade, blockchain technology has seen adoption to infinite domains, health care sector is one of the major domains where there are a greater opportunity and advantage to leverage the benefits of distributed ledgers in storing and securing patient medical records. The Government of India (GoI) is also very keen on digitization in addition to their wider adoption of blockchain technology to serve the citizens by ensuring their privacy and security of personally sensitive . In this paper, we propose a framework for the secure management of patient medical records (PMR) based on the Ethereum blockchain. The PMR is tokenized using the ERC-721 standard which is a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) that can be uniquely mapped to the individual patient. To ensure a higher level of security and non-redundancy, the medical records are stored and maintained in distributed storage like InterPlanetary File System (IPFS); to ensure privacy, the patient’s sensitive information is anonymized through a privacy-preserving scheme. To provide complete control of the medical record to individual patients, we have employed a secret sharing scheme with essential share that is owned by the patient. The proposed framework aims to provide correctness and consistency in managing the PMR over its life cycle.