Patient Identity Ailments and Maintenance Using Blockchain and Health Informatics
K. S. Suganya, R. Nedunchezian, K. S. Arvind · 2022
The most common problems of misidentification of patients in healthcare industry have resulted in incorrect drug prescription and testing, incorrect diagnosis of patient’s ailments and treatment and incorrect discharge of infants to the families after post-natal care. Drug administration, phlebotomy, blood transfusions and surgical treatments are all common instances where patient misidentification can occur in health informatics. Regardless of the technology or approach utilized to precisely identify patients, thorough design of the care processes using Blockchain will ensure effective patient identification prior to any medical intervention and result in safer care with fewer errors. In healthcare, patient information is shared with healthcare experts using electronic health record (EHR), where patient’s information is shared among the healthcare experts with the help of patient/healthcare expert’s identity. Accessing scattered patient data across several EHRs, however, remains a barrier. We are planning to develop a decentralized EHR sharing among the patients and healthcare experts without relying on the legacy centralized EHR systems for the proper patient identification for patient’s ailments and treatment management. In this paper, we are focusing on developing a consortium-based Blockchain for developing the decentralized EHR system using Hyperledger fabric. The patient’s information and EHR is written on the decentralized Blockchain ledger which is maintained across the peer nodes in a distributed manner. Patients identification is done with the help of a third-party certificate authority who works with other peer nodes in the EHR consortium Blockchain. To ensure better privacy, we are also using proxy re-encryption scheme while patient’s EHR is shared with healthcare experts. We created a prototype system to test the performance of our concept, which included the logic of building chaincodes. The findings showed that clinicians may utilize our technology to locate patient information and confirm the patient’s consent to data access. Patients can also receive their previous medical records from other facilities in a seamless manner.