BACKGROUND
Blockchain is a distributed storage technology that provides a powerful tamper-proof technique through a distributed ledger and decentralized network. Initially, blockchain was primarily used for cryptocurrency in the financial field. However, it has attracted attention in various fields such as media, logistics, and medical care. Notably, various studies are being conducted to use blockchain in the medical field, where data reliability and integrity are essential. Representative medical blockchain research includes decentralized medical system design, secure data sharing schemes, and access control for privacy-preservation while sharing electronic medical records (EMRs).
OBJECTIVE
Our goal is to design a blockchain-based EMR sharing system that provides high reliability and scalability so that electronic medical records can be shared safely and efficiently. The system protects patients' privacy in medical data through a medical information exchange process that includes data encryption and access control.
METHODS
We propose a blockchain-based EMR sharing system that allows patients to manage the medical records scattered across multiple hospitals and share them with other users. Our patient information exchange (PIE) chain protects the patient's EMR from security threats such as counterfeiting and privacy issues during data sharing. Also, it guarantees high scalability by using distributed data sharing methods to share regardless of the size or type of EMR quickly. To check the proposed system's performance, we performed a simulation of the EMR sharing process and compared it with previous works on blockchain-based medical systems.
RESULTS
The simulation model is implemented using Hyperledger Fabric, an open source blockchain framework. Experimental results show that it takes an average of 10.1 ms to download 1MB of EMR on the proposed system. Moreover, it provides high scalability as it can rapidly share various data, regardless of size and type. The proposed system proposes a distributed ledger structure and a security level-based access control scheme to prevent data forgery attacks by a malicious user and unauthorized access. Moreover, it ensures high reliability by preventing data loss and privacy leakage due to sniffing and spoofing attacks with a data re-encryption scheme.
CONCLUSIONS
This paper proposes the PIE system, a Medical system that guarantees high reliability and scalability. The PIE system protects the EMR of the Patient created in the medical service process from threats such as personal information leakage and forgery. Through the distributed data sharing process based on blockchain, the EMR of the Patient can be quickly shared regardless of the data size. Our contribution paves the way for a patient-centered EMR sharing environment to integrate and manage patient medical information through the proposed blockchain-based Medical system.
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