Decentralized Patient Centric e-Health Record Management System using Blockchain and IPFS

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralized, patient-centric e-health record system leveraging blockchain and IPFS to enhance privacy, security, and control over health records, enabling secure sharing and immutable storage.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of permissioned blockchain, cryptography, and IPFS for secure, decentralized health record management with patient control.

Findings

Patients can securely grant or revoke access to their records.

Records are stored immutably on IPFS, ensuring data integrity.

The system maintains disease statistics without compromising patient privacy.

Abstract

Electronic Health Records(EHR) are gaining a lot of popularity all over the world. The current EHR systems however have their fair share of problems related to privacy and security. We have proposed a mechanism which provides a solution to most of these problems. Using a permissioned Ethereum blockchain allows the hospitals and patients across the world to be connected to each other. Our mechanism uses a combination of symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography to ensure the secure storage and selective access of records. It gives patients full control over their health records and also allows them to grant or revoke a hospital's access to his/her records. We have used IPFS(inter planetary file system) to store records which has the advantage of being distributed and ensures immutability of records. The proposed model also maintains the statistics of diseases without violating the privacy of any patient.