MedBloc: A Blockchain-Based Secure EHR System for Sharing and Accessing Medical Data

In New Zealand, there is currently no shared Electronic Health Record (EHR) system integrated between major healthcare organisations, such as hospitals, medical centres, and specialists. Thanks to its characteristics, blockchain technology can be a suitable platform for building a large-scale EHR system for New Zealand. In this paper, we present MedBloc, a blockchain-based secure EHR system that enables patients and healthcare providers to access and share health records in a usable yet privacy-preserving manner. MedBloc captures a longitudinal view of the patient's health story and enables patients to give or withdraw consent for regulating access to their records. To protect medical data, MedBloc uses an encryption mechanism and enforces a smart contract based access control mechanism for regulating access. MedBloc not only demonstrates how the blockchain can establish New Zealand's first shared EHR system but it shows how blockchain can potentially disrupt the entire medical technology domain.

[1]  Andrew Lippman,et al.  MedRec: Using Blockchain for Medical Data Access and Permission Management , 2016, 2016 2nd International Conference on Open and Big Data (OBD).

[2]  Mohsen Guizani,et al.  MeDShare: Trust-Less Medical Data Sharing Among Cloud Service Providers via Blockchain , 2017, IEEE Access.

[3]  Vitalik Buterin.  A NEXT GENERATION SMART CONTRACT & DECENTRALIZED APPLICATION PLATFORM , 2015 .

[4]  Independent review of New Zealand ’ s Electronic Health Records Strategy , 2015 .

[5]  Joel Weise-Sunps,et al.  Public Key Infrastructure Overview , 2001 .

[6]  Hyeon-Eui Kim,et al.  Blockchain distributed ledger technologies for biomedical and health care applications , 2017, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[7]  Miguel Castro,et al.  Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery , 2002, TOCS.

[8]  Christian Catalini,et al.  Blockchain Technology for Healthcare: Facilitating the Transition to Patient-Driven Interoperability , 2018, Computational and structural biotechnology journal.

[9]  Douglas C. Schmidt,et al.  FHIRChain: Applying Blockchain to Securely and Scalably Share Clinical Data , 2018, Computational and structural biotechnology journal.

[10]  Gabriela Gheorghe,et al.  SPARER: Secure Cloud-Proof Storage for e-Health Scenarios , 2016, 2016 11th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES).

[11]  Balaji Viswanathan,et al.  Performance Benchmarking and Optimizing Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Platform , 2018, 2018 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS).

[12]  Gillian Dobbie,et al.  A Review of Privacy and Consent Management in Healthcare: A Focus on Emerging Data Sources , 2017, 2017 IEEE 13th International Conference on e-Science (e-Science).

[13]  Fusheng Wang,et al.  Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain , 2017, AMIA.

[14]  Cesare Pautasso,et al.  The Blockchain as a Software Connector , 2016, 2016 13th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA).

[15]  Zibin Zheng,et al.  An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData Congress).

[16]  Muhammad Rizwan Asghar,et al.  AuthStore: Password-Based Authentication and Encrypted Data Storage in Untrusted Environments , 2018, 2018 17th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/ 12th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE).

[17]  Marko Vukolic,et al.  The Quest for Scalable Blockchain Fabric: Proof-of-Work vs. BFT Replication , 2015, iNetSeC.

[18]  Satoshi Nakamoto.  Bitcoin : A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System , 2009 .

[19]  Brodersen.  Blockchain: Securing a New Health Interoperability Experience , 2016 .