HealthChain: A blockchain-based framework for electronic health record management system

Abstract

Electronic health management systems (EHMS) play a crucial role in modern healthcare. They store important medical information such as patients' medical histories, treatment plans, and diagnostic reports. However, the current EHMS landscape faces numerous challenges. These challenges hinder efficient data management, and collaboration among stakeholders, and compromise patient privacy and data security. Blockchain technology offers a promising solution to address these issues. By leveraging its decentralized and immutable nature, blockchain can create a secure, transparent, and tamper-resistant platform for storing, managing, and sharing electronic health records. This paper proposes an end-to-end solution called Healthchain based on a private permissioned blockchain network. Healthchain uses the Istanbul Byzantine fault tolerance (IBFT) consensus algorithm to reduce computation costs and increase speed. Secure multiparty computation allows medical data monetization without compromising privacy or data authenticity (ensured by blockchain) along with Zero knowledge proof and differential privacy for researchers. HealthChain also uses an efficient method for storing medical reports using IPFS, reducing the burden on single storage. It creates awareness about privacy issues and creates awareness about social engineering attacks based on the project. This paper explains the proposed framework, comparing performance with existing traditional and digital systems, and considers Bangladesh as an example to test its viability.