Towards a Blockchain-Based Secure Electronic Medical Record for Healthcare Applications

Abstract

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are highly sensitive information shared among peers to keep up-to-date patient history. Providing security, privacy, and availability to these sensitive data is a challenge because, typically, after data publication the patient loses control over them. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based approach to secure EMR for healthcare applications, where access control is patient-centric. Our proposal keeps encrypted EMRs in the blockchain, and the patient shares the decryption key only with healthcare professionals in which he/she trusts. Blockchain allows untrusted node, in a distributed peer-to-peer network to correctly and verifiably interact with each other, without any reliable intermediary. We investigate the scalability of our approach through simulations. Results show that it scales well since increasing the number of nodes in the network implies a linear increase in the size of the stored chain. Results also reveal that the time for inserting a new EMR in the blockchain remains low even when the number of nodes in the network increases.