Current systems used by medical institutions for the management and transfer of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) can be vulnerable to security and privacy threats. In addition, these centralized systems often lack interoperability and give patients limited or no access to their own EMRs. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed data sharing scheme that applies the security benefits of blockchain to handle these concerns. With blockchain, we incorporate smart contracts and a distributed storage system to alleviate the dependence on the record-generating institutions to manage and share patient records. To preserve privacy of patient records, we implement our smart contracts as a method to allow patients to verify attributes prior to granting access rights. Our proposed scheme also facilitates selective sharing of medical records among staff members that belong to different levels of a hierarchical institution. We provide extensive security, privacy, and evaluation analyses to show that our proposed scheme is both efficient and practical.
Years of heavy regulation and bureaucratic inefficiency have slowed innovation for electronic medical records (EMRs). We now face a critical need for such innovation, as personalization and data science prompt patients to engage in the details of their healthcare and restore agency over their medical data. In this paper, we propose MedRec: a novel, decentralized record management system to handle EMRs, using blockchain technology. Our system gives patients a comprehensive, immutable log and easy access to their medical information across providers and treatment sites. Leveraging unique blockchain properties, MedRec manages authentication, confidentiality, accountability and data sharing -- crucial considerations when handling sensitive information. A modular design integrates with providers' existing, local data storage solutions, facilitating interoperability and making our system convenient and adaptable. We incentivize medical stakeholders (researchers, public health authorities, etc.) to participate in the network as blockchain &#x0022;miners&#x0022;. This provides them with access to aggregate, anonymized data as mining rewards, in return for sustaining and securing the network via Proof of Work. MedRec thus enables the emergence of data economics, supplying big data to empower researchers while engaging patients and providers in the choice to release metadata. The purpose of this short paper is to expose, prior to field tests, a working prototype through which we analyze and discuss our approach. The recent increase in reported incidents of surveillance and security breaches compromising users' privacy call into question the current model, in which third-parties collect and control massive amounts of personal data. Bit coin has demonstrated in the financial space that trusted, auditable computing is possible using a decentralized network of peers accompanied by a public ledger. In this paper, we describe a decentralized personal data management system that ensures users own and control their data. We implement a protocol that turns a block chain into an automated access-control manager that does not require trust in a third party. Unlike Bit coin, transactions in our system are not strictly financial -- they are used to carry instructions, such as storing, querying and sharing data. Finally, we discuss possible future extensions to block chains that could harness them into a well-rounded solution for trusted computing problems in society. 