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Top1. Introduction
We have shifted from a document-based storage system to Electronic Health Records(EHR) but the ownership of such crucial and private data remains in the hands of anonymous people and thus vulnerable to security breaches(Kumar Rai, n.d.; Rai et al., 2021). EHR is a digitized record of the medical history of the patient, including diagnosis, treatments, follow-up appointments, allergy records, laboratory, and test results. The family history can be included by the patient in his record. All such data requires high privacy from the outside world and must be shared with authentic entities only. Blockchain technology has proven to be a boon for sharing such confidential information because of its features like an immutable, secure, and reliant ledger. It is a decentralized platform that provides network security at every level, stores data in immutable form, and is highly efficient allowing authorized access to health records. Such features help in reducing human and system errors and increased the accuracy and easy accessibility of records(Khezr et al. 2019). There are different kinds of blockchain technology that are being used for enterprise purposes. Ethereum and Hyperledger are two of the most widely used blockchains(Khezr et al. 2019). Ethereum has its popularity as it provides a permissioned network as well as high performance for its transactions. The purpose of Ethereum is to integrate and improve on the ideas of scripting, cryptocurrencies, and on-chain meta-protocols, allowing developers to create arbitrary consensus-based applications with scalability, standardization, feature-completeness, development simplicity, and interoperability(Buterin n.d.). Thus Ethereum gives its users the benefits of possessing their data records and also sharing them in a secure way. PCMHR makes patients the owner of their health records as they become better informed and more involved in their care. At each step of treatment, the patient controls who has access to their information securely and efficiently. It has enabled us to build care around the patient and bring transparency to the patient-doctor relationship.. Thus Ethereum gives its users the benefits of possessing their data records and also sharing them in a secure way. PCMHR makes patients the owner of their health records as they become better informed and more involved in their care. At each step of treatment, the patient controls who has access to their information securely and efficiently. It has enabled us to build care around the patient and bring transparency to the patient-doctor relationship.
There are several cases where the need for PCMHRs is highly recommended, such as A patient with HIV who wants to keep a detailed record of the treatment process, as well as post-treatment, recovery, and monitoring. A thorough examination of his medical history may be critical to his recovery (Narendra Kumar Rao and Bhaskar Kumar Rao 2019). Patients should also be able to build a point-to-point channel to communicate information about their history and present drugs while transferring from one hospital to another (Madine et al. 2020). He will very certainly be needed to sign a consent form that specifies the types of data that may be provided, the facts about the beneficiary, and the length of time that the information can be accessible by the beneficiary. This may be difficult to do, particularly if a patient is relocating to a different city, region, or state and does not know the hospital where he will be treated shortly (Narendra Kumar Rao and Bhaskar Kumar Rao 2019). PCMHRs have their use cases at all such places where communication between two hospitals is required and both the hospitals use a different kind of EHR software. Since PCMHR is a multichain system it can share data of a patient regardless of any public blockchain platform it is being shared on. However, it is hard to store whole EHR data in blockchain because of the size and the price of the blockchain (Narendra Kumar Rao and Bhaskar Kumar Rao 2019). Thus, it is seen as a challenge while using blockchain technology to provide enough storage capacities for higher scalability. Therefore, in PCMHR we have adopted IPFS for storing the records in a decentralized file system to enhance the scalability and resolve the storage problem associated with blockchain storage.