Smart contract and blockchain-based secured approach for storing and sharing electronic health records

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are important data for doctors, patients, and researchers in medical science. EHRs have great medical value in the healthcare industry to improve healthcare services. Therefore, digital health records should be collected, stored, and maintained securely. Smart contract-based blockchain technology provides the most protective way of storing and sharing data. Stored records in blockchain are immutable and are corruption-free results accurate analysis. In this paper, a model is proposed for capturing, storing, and protecting health records in an e-healthcare system through blockchain technology. Transactions are executed in the Ethereum platform through smart contracts written in the Solidity programming language. Health records are stored in a decentralized, distributed digital ledger. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is incorporated with the proposed system to store large medical reports in the cloud storage. Transaction deployment cost and information retrieval cost have been calculated. The average transaction costs for doctor and patient registration are 0.00394 ETH and 0.00438 ETH respectively. The performance of the proposed model has been compared with the existing health record systems and shows better performance in terms of cost. Blockchain technology provides better security during health records sharing between patients and medical communities. The model provides smart contract and blockchain-based solutions to ensure immutability, transparency, and traceability of health data.