Blockchain-based Patient-centric Health Record Management

Abstract

Mohammad Madine, 'Blockchain-based Patient-centric Health Record Manage- ment', M.Sc. Thesis, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, United Arab Emirates, May 2021. Personalized health calls for patient-centric handling and management of health records, at which patients have control over their data, and have the option to delegate permissions to other trusted people under special cases, in addition to having the ability to share the data with doctors registered under a di_erent network. Today's health management systems fall short of having a secure, patient-centric, and practical scheme, which poses serious threats to their authenticity as a solution. In this thesis, we propose a blockchain-based solution for three main healthcare management aspects. First, to enable patient-centric health record control with full decentralization and traceability, using smart contracts, decentralized storage, and multi-purpose computation nodes. Second, to allow the delegation of consent management such that patients can grant trusted guardians to share health data with doctors in case of emergency or incapacitation, which utilizes advanced threshold cryptographic schemes and multi-party authorization. Third, to establish interoperability across multiple healthcare networks, by taking advantage of special veri_cation nodes and the decentralized application of the patients. For all main components, we de_ne our proposed system architecture, design and implement algorithms as Ethereum smart contracts, deploy our software for validation and analysis, and discuss our approach in terms of security and generalization.

Date of Award	May 2021
Original language	American English