$d$-MABE: Distributed Multilevel Attribute-Based EMR Management and Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed blockchain-based system for secure, privacy-preserving, and interoperable electronic medical record management, enabling patient-controlled access and hierarchical sharing among medical staff.

Contribution

It presents a novel distributed EMR management scheme utilizing blockchain, smart contracts, and hierarchical sharing, addressing security, privacy, and interoperability issues.

Findings

The scheme ensures secure and private access to EMRs.

It supports hierarchical and selective sharing of medical records.

The system is shown to be efficient and practical through analysis.

Abstract

Current systems used by medical institutions for the management and transfer of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) can be vulnerable to security and privacy threats. In addition, these centralized systems often lack interoperability and give patients limited or no access to their own EMRs. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed data sharing scheme that applies the security benefits of blockchain to handle these concerns. With blockchain, we incorporate smart contracts and a distributed storage system to alleviate the dependence on the record-generating institutions to manage and share patient records. To preserve privacy of patient records, we implement our smart contracts as a method to allow patients to verify attributes prior to granting access rights. Our proposed scheme also facilitates selective sharing of medical records among staff members that belong to different levels of a hierarchical institution. We provide extensive security, privacy, and evaluation analyses to show that our proposed scheme is both efficient and practical.