MediBlocks: secure exchanging of electronic health records (EHRs) using trust-based blockchain network with privacy concerns

Healthcare is a sensitive domain, and it is necessary to design an efficient solution in the healthcare system. Electronic Medical Records often have high privacy-sensitive data; unauthorized access to these patient data could hurt patients' reputations and cause financial losses to the organization. Most of the existing healthcare systems are based on a centralized architecture, which is more vulnerable such as hacking the healthcare system, arbitrary modification attacks, and single-point-of-failure. Also, these systems increase the cost due to various factors like—establishing a trusted network, cost per transaction, and limited access to patient health data, which are the problems that remain open until now. The blockchain is a general-purpose technology that seems to be an innovative and interesting technology that can improve the Health care domain by solving the above issues with a secure architecture. This paper address addresses the challenging problems. (1) How to provide secure data exchange and anonymity. (2) How to preserve the personal data privacy of the patient health records. The proposed solution leverages the Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain that establishes a secured and trusted network to all stakeholders, ensuring the integrity of protected health information and providing authenticity and health access control. Further, the entire supply chain can be traced, decreasing duplicate tests and unnecessary service, increasing accountability, preserving the crucial documents, limiting the unauthorized sharing of the EHRs documents, and offering lower costs across the care continuum.