Toward Securing Healthcare Data Using Smart Contracts, Private, and Public Ethereum’s Blockchain Technology

Even with the coalesce efforts from various defense and security consortium, medical industries are still lacking viable solution to secure the increasing electronic medical record (EMR) breaches. In this technological era, providing secure access to medical records to their patients is not only important, but it also helps various healthcare providers to coordinate for smooth treatment. Achieving data confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity while maintaining secure access control is essential in the medical sector. Secure coordination between multiple provider and accessibility of medical history is very limited in current health records system. The emerging technology, Blockchain, can be used to secure decentralize medical records while making the medical history readily accessible to patients or their medical providers. The decentralized system, the distributed ledger, and the smart contract are the key features of blockchain that can be utilized to replace our current records system and invent a secure, flexible, and more reliable technical infrastructure. This technology will require patients to be accountable for their medical records while allowing authorized medical authorities to securely share anonymized medical data between multiple clinics, individual doctors, pharmacies, and insurance providers globally. Additionally, the EMR per patient will be stored for a lifetime, which is important to medical researchers as well as pharmaceutical scientists to develop precise medicines. To develop such robust system, this research focuses on the security aspect of the system by analyzing the constraints of the blockchain and using Ethereum’s private and public blockchains along with smart contracts and cryptography.