A Blockchain Based Patient Consent Management Technique for Electronic Health Record Sharing

Rapid advancements to digitization in Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems and record sharing have happened at the cost of uncontrolled access and insecure control to the patient’s sensitive health information. This is due to existing centralized systems and intermediaries sharing the medical records with multiple stakeholders causing single point of failure, data tampering, correlation attack, loss of privacy and transparency. Besides this, patient’s consent for personal health record sharing is neglected or restricted to one-time consent policy that fails to produce tamper-proof evidence in an irrefutable way. With the emergence of promising distributed ledger technology like blockchain makes it easy to realize the trust factors required for patient-controlled record sharing without relying on a centralized third parties.This work proposes a smart contract based blockchain solution/framework for patient consent management to achieve a secure health record exchange and its access in automated way. The proposed solution is implemented on a public blockchain called as Ethereum. The security analysis of smart contracts for potential vulnerabilities is conducted using auditing tools like Oyente and Surya. Furthermore, the implemented solution is evaluated in terms of throughput, average latency using a Hyperledger Caliper benchmarking tool. Finally, the security and performance analysis illustrates that proposed framework is suitable for real-world patient-centric health record sharing in EHRs.