MediTrans—Patient‐centric interoperability through blockchain

Abstract

SummaryIn order to ensure best health care experience for the user, the user should be able to access or grant access to his medical information as the requirement arises. Currently, when the data are residing in hospital proprietary Electronic Health Record (EHR), this is not possible. Hence there is a requirement for patient operated PHR where the details of the treatment of patient is with the patient. This paper proposes a blockchain‐based, secure interoperable patient‐centric data access management system—MediTrans. In the proposed model, the patient owns his/her treatment related data and stores it in a secure personal health record (PHR) cloud. The tool provides technique for secure transfer of patient related data from Hospital EHR to patient PHR Cloud. Patient can give controlled access of patient's medical data to Health Care Providers for a specific period of time. MediTrans proposes secure access management of data stored in PHR cloud to authorised person via Blockchain Technology and Ciphertext policy attribute‐based encryption technique. The proposed design was evaluated by developing a prototype on Ethereum Blockchain with OpenEMR as the healthcare system. Performance analysis was carried out by varying the size of the data and the number of users. The results obtained were promising, which gives clear insights on the feasibility of the approach taken.