Eletronic Health Records using Blockchain Technology

TL;DR

This paper explores how blockchain and smart contracts can address data privacy and accessibility challenges in healthcare, proposing a large-scale EHR access architecture to improve data management and interoperability.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated blockchain-based architecture for healthcare data management, specifically focusing on Electronic Health Records and smart contracts as mediators.

Findings

Proposes a blockchain architecture for EHR access control

Highlights the potential of smart contracts in healthcare data management

Addresses privacy and accessibility conflicts in healthcare data

Abstract

Data privacy refers to ensuring that users keep control over access to information, whereas data accessibility refers to ensuring that information access is unconstrained. Conflicts between privacy and accessibility of data are natural to occur, and healthcare is a domain in which they are particularly relevant. In the present article, we discuss how blockchain technology, and smart contracts, could help in some typical scenarios related to data access, data management and data interoperability for the specific healthcare domain. We then propose the implementation of a large-scale information architecture to access Electronic Health Records (EHRs) based on Smart Contracts as information mediators. Our main contribution is the framing of data privacy and accessibility issues in healthcare and the proposal of an integrated blockchain based architecture.