A Decentralised Application for Storing Electronic Health Records using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

With the systems currently used in healthcare, medical records are often centrally stored in local databases or cloud services and managed by each individual healthcare provider. Due to this, the information exchange between healthcare providers is often limited. Consequently, upon visiting a new healthcare provider, the patient’s past records may be inaccessible, potentially resulting in lower quality of the provided healthcare. This thesis proposes a decentralised web application using blockchain technology, for managing medical records, with the purpose of enabling data sharing between healthcare providers. Another purpose of the proposed system is to provide patients with data ownership, by allowing them to set access restrictions on their data. This empowers patients by giving them more control over their data. The proposed system is implemented using Ganache as a local Ethereum blockchain, IPFS for medical data storage, Firebase for storing application data and React Native for the GUI. The proposed system allows for several future improvements and expansions to be made. Improvements can include a more robust cryptographic scheme and using restricted storage of medical data, as well as a consortium blockchain. Possible expansions include logging read-operations and developing a way for access restrictions to be bypassed in case of an emergency.