MedAccess: A Scalable Architecture for Blockchain-based Health Record Management

Abstract

Electronic Health Record is a digital version of a patient's medical history maintained by a healthcare provider over the course of their visits. Unfortunately, medical records of one patient is fragmented across many hospitals, private clinics, labs, pharmacies and personal health records from wearables. Healthcare providers hesitate to share “proprietary” data. This is where the blockchain technology comes in use. Moreover, blockchain opens the opportunity to record patients' records as blocks, encrypt and make it impossible (immutable) to proceed with any changes for the information stored. The main goal would be to take advantage of the blockchain technology provide immutability, data integrity where each record is privately encrypted and publicly viewed. Nevertheless, the overall cost to store information in a practical blockchain itself is very expensive. This is where a decentralized P2P network that can store the data off-the-chain would assist in storing the actual content of each medical record and only the identifier is sent and stored on the blockchain. Any individual would be able to publicly view the medical record, however, only patients possess the private key and hence share it with desired individuals e.g. physicians or any medical practitioner. In this paper, we propose an architecture that can be used to develop scalable blockchain applications using an off-chain solution that will allow physicians, lab technicians and patients to manage the medical records in a secure manner.