Incentive EMR Sharing System Based on Consortium Blockchain and IPFS

Healthcare (Basel). 2022 Sep 22;10(10):1840. doi: 10.3390/healthcare10101840.

Abstract

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are extremely private data in the medical industry. Clinicians use the patient data that the EMR stores to quickly assess a patient's status and save diagnostic information. In the conventional medical model, it is easy for duplicate exams, medical resource waste, or the loss of medical records to happen when a patient is transferred between several medical facilities due to problems with data sharing and exchange, inadequate data privacy, security, confidentiality, and difficulties with data traceability. This paper recommends a Hyperledger Fabric-based strategy to promote the exchange of EMR models. With the use of Hyperledger Fabric, EMR stakeholders can be brought into the channel to facilitate data sharing. Attribute-based access control (ABAC) allows users to design the data access control policy, and the data access control may improve security. Any record stored in the blockchain can be viewed using the Hyperledger Fabric feature and it cannot be altered or destroyed, ensuring data traceability. Through proxy re-encryption, which makes sure that the data is not leaked during data exchange, data secrecy can be ensured. A module for medical tokens has now been added. Many foreign medical institutions currently use the medical token system, and the system described in this paper can use the tokens to pay for some medical expenses. The tokens are obtained by the patient's initiative to share their EMR with the medical institution for research, which is how many foreign medical institutions currently use the medical token mechanism. This paradigm can encourage the growth of medical data by enabling stakeholders to collaborate and share EMR trust.

Keywords: EMR sharing; IPFS; access control; consortium blockchain; proxy re-encryption.