Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain
This addresses the need for secure and trustable EMR sharing among healthcare providers and researchers, but it is incremental as it applies blockchain to a known domain.
The paper tackles the problem of securely sharing electronic medical records (EMRs) by proposing a blockchain-based framework, resulting in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and fine-grained access control, with potential to reduce turnaround time and costs.
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers. Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research studies. We propose a framework on managing and sharing EMR data for cancer patient care. In collaboration with Stony Brook University Hospital, we implemented our framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and fine-grained access control over EMR data. The proposed work can significantly reduce the turnaround time for EMR sharing, improve decision making for medical care, and reduce the overall cost