Privacy-preserving patient-centric electronic health records exchange using blockchain

Abstract

The global electronic health records (EHRs) market is expected to reach USD 38.5 billion by 2030. This growth is expected owing to reasons, such as the digitalization of healthcare systems, and wearable healthcare devices. However, this raises the challenge to preserve the privacy of EHRs when massive amounts of data are created, retrieved, and circulated daily. Furthermore, it is vital that the patient's EHRs that are controlled by the medical industry are transited to a patient-centric model, where patients are fully authorized to control their data. It is widely acknowledged that distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), particularly blockchain enable the storage and exchange of data in a decentralized, trusted, pseudonymous, and immutable fashion. This chapter explores adapting blockchain technologies toward patient-centric and privacy-preserving EHR exchange. Furthermore, the concept of patient-centric EHR is introduced while exploring existing methods on privacy-preserving and patient-centric EHR exchange using blockchain, and possible research directions.