MediChainTM: A Secure Decentralized Medical Data Asset Management System

TL;DR

This paper introduces MediChainTM, a permissioned blockchain system for secure, decentralized medical data management that uses off-chain storage and accessible interfaces, addressing scalability and usability issues of traditional blockchains.

Contribution

It presents a novel permissioned blockchain architecture with off-chain data storage for medical data, enhancing scalability and user accessibility in healthcare applications.

Findings

Implemented in Hyperledger framework

Demonstrated patient-centered health data management

Addresses scalability and usability challenges

Abstract

The set of distributed ledger architectures known as blockchain is best known for cryptocurrency applications such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These permissionless block chains are showing the potential to be disruptive to the financial services industry. Their broader adoption is likely to be limited by the maximum block size, the cost of the Proof of Work consensus mechanism, and the increasing size of any given chain overwhelming most of the participating nodes. These factors have led to many cryptocurrency blockchains to become centralized in the nodes with enough computing power and storage to be a dominant miner and validator. Permissioned chains operate in trusted environments and can, therefore, avoid the computationally expensive consensus mechanisms. Permissioned chains are still susceptible to asset storage demands and non-standard user interfaces that will impede their adoption. This paper describes an approach to addressing these limitations: permissioned blockchain that uses off-chain storage of the data assets and this is accessed through a standard browser and mobile app. The implementation in the Hyperledger framework is described as is an example use of patient-centered health data management.