$d$-MABE: Distributed Multilevel Attribute-Based EMR Management and Applications
This addresses privacy and access control problems for patients and medical institutions in EMR management, representing an incremental application of blockchain technology to a known domain.
The paper tackles the security, privacy, and interoperability issues in centralized Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems by proposing a distributed data sharing scheme using blockchain, smart contracts, and distributed storage, resulting in a system that is shown to be efficient and practical through extensive analyses.
Current systems used by medical institutions for the management and transfer of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) can be vulnerable to security and privacy threats. In addition, these centralized systems often lack interoperability and give patients limited or no access to their own EMRs. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed data sharing scheme that applies the security benefits of blockchain to handle these concerns. With blockchain, we incorporate smart contracts and a distributed storage system to alleviate the dependence on the record-generating institutions to manage and share patient records. To preserve privacy of patient records, we implement our smart contracts as a method to allow patients to verify attributes prior to granting access rights. Our proposed scheme also facilitates selective sharing of medical records among staff members that belong to different levels of a hierarchical institution. We provide extensive security, privacy, and evaluation analyses to show that our proposed scheme is both efficient and practical.