Blockchain technology applied to electronic health records

Abstract

Blockchain technology is on the cusp of revolutionizing the way we handle healthcare data, in term of storage and utilization. The main goal is to empower patients to be the center of their own health record so that, the patient doesn't have to rely on different institutions or hospitals they might visit. Blockchain technology and smart contracts provide an interesting and innovative way to keep track of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). This technology could help the patients to have better control of their own data. Health professionals and institutions, such as hospitals, could have access to patient’s data owned by other institutions. In the present article, we discuss how blockchain technologies can be used to handle EHR while improving the efficiency of operations through streamlining processes and transparency. We propose an architecture to manage and share healthcare data among different organizations. The proposed work could significantly reduce the time needed to share patient data among different health organizations and reduce the overall cost.