Blockchain-Enabled Electronic Health Records for Healthcare 4.0

Abstract

Healthcare delivery is on the verge of a fundamental shift into the new era of smart and connected health care, termed Health Care 4.0. Sharing healthcare data is an important step in improving the healthcare system’s intelligence and service quality. Healthcare data, which is a personal asset of the patient, should be owned and managed by the patient rather than being dispersed among several healthcare systems, preventing data exchange and jeopardizing patient privacy. EHRs (electronic health records) assist individuals by allowing them to combine and manage their medical data. On the other hand, today’s EHR systems fall short of providing patients with traceable, trustworthy, and secure ownership over their medical data, creating serious security risks. In this article, the authors propose PcBEHR (patient-controlled blockchain enabled electronic health records) as a way for patients to have safe control over their data that is decentralized, immutable, transparent, traceable, and trustworthy. Decentralized interplanetary file storage (IPFS) is used in the suggested technique.