Efficient patient-friendly medical blockchain system based on attribute-based encryption

Abstract

In recent years, there have been rapid advances in electronic medical record (EMR) sharing with the fast development of blockchain technology. Using blockchain technology to build the electronic medical record sharing system can effectively solve the problem that medical data is hard to share between different hospitals’ databases. However, existing EMR sharing system using blockchain technology is mainly for medical institutions, and the patients as the data owner even can’t easily share their own personal EMR when they need to use it. The patient’s demand for management of personal EMRs is largely ignored. At the same time, the doctor’s longitudinal access to personal EMRs requires a fairly large overhead, which severely causes treatment delay. This paper proposes a patient-friendly blockchain electronic medical data sharing system based on main-sub structured blockchain, which enables patients to manage their personal medical data directly and enhances the authorized users’ efficiency of access to personal EMRs significantly. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme is efficient enough to support the real medical record sharing applications.