Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain

• Published in: AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings Vol. 2017; pp. 650 - 659
• Main Authors: Dubovitskaya, Alevtina, Xu, Zhigang, Ryu, Samuel, Schumacher, Michael, Wang, Fusheng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Medical Informatics Association 2017
• ISSN: 1942-597X; 1559-4076

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers. Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research studies. We propose a framework on managing and sharing EMR data for cancer patient care. In collaboration with Stony Brook University Hospital, we implemented our framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and fine-grained access control over EMR data. The proposed work can significantly reduce the turnaround time for EMR sharing, improve decision making for medical care, and reduce the overall cost.