A Blockchain-based Functional Approach for Geriatric Electronic Health Record

Abstract

An electronic health record (EHR) is a repository that contains the events related to the patient's health, such as preventive tests and disease treatments. These registries play a vital role for health field because they improve patient care and medical prescription, as well as the provision of data for the clinical research field; in this context, the health of the elderly is a priority. The versatility of an EHR depends on aspects related to security, privacy, integrity, and immutability. Privacy and security are necessary requirements for data exchange (between medical service providers and patients) because they prevent data loss and unwanted access in the scheme. In this sense, the patient must have the privilege to share his clinical record with other users. In addition, the integrity must be guaranteed by the immutability of the events recorded over time. Without a doubt, a reliable scheme for EHR management is a must. Facing these challenges, blockchain was designed to store digital assets in a decentralized environment; that is, without the supervision of trusted third parties. This technology can carry digital assets or tokens, such as smart contracts. These contracts automate functional requirements and inherit the immutability feature from blockchain. This ensures strict compliance between the parties sharing information, ensures that the data is not manipulated and prevents data leakage. With these considerations, the aim of paper is to define a blockchain-based functional approach for geriatric electronic health record. For this, this research focuses on four main phases, namely: core concepts review, requirements specification, model development, and functional test. In this context, components were developed (using smart contracts) and implemented on the blockchain; in addition, web forms were used to test our proposal. Conclusions and future work are described at the end of this paper.