A Review on State-of-Art Blockchain Schemes for Electronic Health Records Management

Abstract

In today’s world, Electronic Health Records (EHR) are highly segregated and available only within the organization with which the patient is associated. If a patient has to visit another hospital there is no secure way for hospitals to communicate and share medical records. Hence, people are always asked to redo tests that have been done earlier in different hospitals. This leads to monetary, time, and resource loss. Even if the organizations are ready to share data, there are no secure methods for sharing without disturbing data privacy, integrity, and confidentiality. When health data are stored or transferred via unsecured means there are always possibilities for adversaries to initiate an attack and modify them. To overcome these hurdles and secure the storage and sharing of health records, blockchain, a very disruptive technology can be integrated with the healthcare system for EHR management. This paper surveys recent works on the distributed, decentralized systems for EHR storage in healthcare organizations.