A novel blockchain based electronic health record automation system for healthcare

Technology has widespread health records that may have been digitized into electronic health records (EHRs). In the present scenario, patients ought to have their health records across multiple hospitals in the geographical area. In such case accessibility of health data from one provider to another at the right time remains a major challenge, especially when patients are in a critical condition having access to fragmented health records from multiple sources into a single chain. In this paper, blockchain smart contracts are designed so as to provide a regulated solution to the need of patients, physicians, and health service providers. The proposed system aims to exchange health information on a blockchain platform to build a smart e-health system. The proposed system launches health models namely immutable patient log creation with Modified Merkle Tree data structure for secure storage and rapid access of health records, update medical records, health information exchange between different providers, and viewership contracts on the peer to peer blockchain network. In this system, blockchain is a clinical data repository that provides patients a complete, distributed ledger record containing records of all the events and seamless access to their electronic health records through healthcare providers. As an important feature, this system provides high security and integrity through cryptographic hash functions. The work has been carried out on a number of trials to check the effectiveness of the proposed system. The qualitative and quantitative metrics of the proposed system has been measured to evaluate the performance of resources, transactions per second, and the latency of a transaction.