Blockchain-Based Medical Records System

Abstract

Health is a critical aspect of a human’s life and so, healthcare is one of the largest market sectors in India and is growing at a fast pace. India’s healthcare industry has been growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of around 22% since 2016 and is expected to reach USD 372 Billion in 2022. It produces huge amounts of data in the form of individual health records, among others. There is a crucial need for better management of this data, to make it interoperable while dealing with confidentiality concerns. The four key entities involved in the patient medical records cycle are patients, hospitals, insurers, and government. Until now, electronic solutions to this issue have been centralized, that is, involving a client-server architecture. However, such a centralized architecture faces several drawbacks like risks to failure, attacks, and abuse of power. A blockchain-based system presents a better solution with proper encryption, permission mechanism, and interoperability in such a scenario. In our solution, we use Ethereum blockchain technology and a few others to present a proof-of-concept solution to the stated problem. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.