Toward blockchain based electronic health record management with fine grained attribute based encryption and decentralized storage mechanisms

Abstract

Current Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems exhibit several critical drawbacks, including significant vulnerabilities in security, privacy, and scalability. Traditional centralized databases are highly susceptible to cyber attacks, data breaches, and unauthorized access, posing severe risks to the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive patient information. In addition, these systems often face interoperability issues, which hinder seamless information sharing and access among healthcare providers. The absence of a unified and secure framework exacerbates these problems, leading to operational inefficiencies and increased administrative costs in the management of health records. This study introduces an innovative framework designed to overcome these challenges by integrating blockchain technology with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The proposed EHRChain solution leverages attribute-based encryption to provide fine-grained access control, ensuring that only authorized users can retrieve and decrypt medical records. The IPFS framework eliminates single points of failure by storing encrypted data in a decentralized fashion, thus increasing the resilience of the system to cyber attacks. Incorporating blockchain technology ensures the immutability and traceability of medical data, significantly reducing the risks of data tampering. Performance evaluations using real data set simulation demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of our framework, highlighting its potential to revolutionize the handling of electronic medical records. This study not only underscores the advantages of integrating blockchain with EHR systems but also presents a scalable and secure solution tailored to meet the demands of modern healthcare infrastructures. Our approach promises to improve data security, improve interoperability, and reduce operational inefficiencies, leading to a new standard in electronic health records. This record is sourced from MEDLINE/PubMed, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine