Electronic Health Record’s Security and Access Control Using Blockchain and IPFS

Abstract

An electronic health record (EHR) typically contains sensitive medical records, personal information, doctors’ provided prescription, and other physical histories of a patient. This digital approach remodeled the health sector while increasing privacy concerns and possibility of security breaches. This paper proposes an EHR system based on blockchain, interplanetary file system (IPFS), and cryptographic functions and includes features like secure access control having accountability, transparency, immutability of data in a cost-efficient patient-centered architecture which is free from third-party interruption. Here, we divided data into two categories and three types of participants who are verified with digital certificates are granted permission by the patients and then they can access data. Finally, we build and investigate a simple implementation to analyze the cost of the system and propose some approaches to optimize it.