Securely sharing Electronic Health Records over blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain technology has gained significant traction in recent years. These decentralized databases offer security, immutability, and scalability across various applications. These properties are ideal for building decentralized applications, which are solutions that combine off-chain components (traditional web services, front-end, and back-end) with on-chain components (smart contracts). This paper proposes a novel usage of this technology in the context of securing computation and storage of EHRs (electronic health records) and giving back to patients ownership over their medical data, thus ensuring that their information remains private and they can choose whether to give access or transfer that respective information to any institution of their choice. Using recently released technologies, such as zero knowledge and homomorphic encryption (at the time of writing this paper), we have achieved promising results. This success with encryption technologies instills confidence that in the not-so-distant future the relationship between healthcare institutions (hospitals, research institutions) and patients will soon undergo a significant shift. Over time, this solution, or its improved variants, may form the basis for other applications that require selective access to private data to perform private computations.