Patient-centric information management in blockchain and interplanetary storage

In the healthcare sector, the protection of patient information is an essential factor in terms of secrecy and privacy. This information is very useful for industrial and research purposes. Electronic medical records (EMR) hold data related to patients and their treatments. According to GDPR (general data protection regulation), patient information should be anonymous. There should not be any disclosure of patients private information during data transfer. For hiding patients private information, encryption is required. For developing countries, the treatment cost is also a matter for health services. Blockchain technology provides facilities like distributed and immutable data storage and peer-to-peer data transfer. We need cheaper blockchain-based solutions for the healthcare sector. IPFS provides a secure way to store the content of the files in a decentralized manner by using the Merkle tree. By using IPFS with blockchain, we can counter the use of fake medical records or the forge of EMR. In this paper, the interplanetary file system (IPFS) is used to store EMR in compliance with GDPR. We work on the treatment cycle of patients with a blockchain-maintained hospital and doctor. Our proposed system enhances the security and transparency of patients’ treatment information. We compared our proposed system with previously developed systems and provided analytical results in terms of security, privacy, and cost. We implemented our proposed system on a Python-customized blockchain with a customized consensus algorithm.