Inter-Planetary File System Enabled Blockchain Solution for Securing Healthcare Records

Abstract

The sharing of health-related data has become challenging in terms of data security which may lead to compromise patient's privacy. Generally, once the report generated by the health provider is final, it will be uploaded to the hospital's private repository. When it comes to the hospital as an organization, many participants [Doctor, Patient, Researcher, Insurance company] requires the report of patients for one or other reasons. Providing a single platform for all participants to share confidential data securely is a difficult and challenging task. Care should be taken such that the personal data of the patients should not be misused or tampered. Existing methods have been proved insufficient to effectively manage and secure health records. Blockchain technology, a recent research trend, has shown promising results for such secure data sharing. Since the contents of blockchain are tamper-proof, all participants can access the data but cannot change the data. By employing smart contracts and access control programs one can monitor data activity in the blockchain network. In this article, a blockchain architecture has been designed and discussed for secure and easy sharing of patient's Personal Health Report(PHR) among the different players of health organization. Further, Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) has also used in the proposed blockchain architecture for faster retrieval of PHR's. We demonstrate the strengths of our proposed model, its user-centric focus and also the experimental results. © 2020 IEEE.