A MODEL FOR BLOCKCHAIN-BASED DISTRIBUTED ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS

Abstract

Electronic health records (EHR) are usually maintained in a centralized way by health organizations, leaving aside an integration between different health organizations to view the complete health history of a given patient. This lack of EHR integration prevents patients and physicians to have a unified view of medical records, which are often stored in different health organizations. Recent studies have proposed using Blockchain technology in distributed architectures due to its security and integration properties. In this context, this article proposes an application architecture using Blockchain technology for distributed EHR integration, which is called UniRec (Unified Medical Records). In the proposed model we seek to understand its effectivity, performance and applicability, using a case study methodology. We developed a prototype, which is evaluated using a test scenario. The prototype proved to be effective for distributed EHR integration, allowing one healthcare institution to view an EHR previously added by different providers, after being granted permission. During the test scenario execution, we obtained an average response time of 2.77 seconds, 961.6 MiB of memory consumption, 21.5% CPU usage and a total disk usage of 34.6 MB. The results reinforce the potential and feasibility of employing Blockchain for managing and storing medical data.