1. Abstract

• Medical history of a patient holds an important and key role in prescribing and counter the current health problems of a patient. Missing out some details in history may create a huge problem. Also, many time the patient may forget his medication, his tests and even the problems he faced.
• Getting the data is essential but knowing the authenticity of the data provided is more important. The doctor should have the confidence that the data he is looking at is not tampered or incorrect. The patient also must have the trust on the system that its data will be secure and there will be no non authorized access to it since it contains sensitive medical information.
• Another major problem faced is the denial of a doctor prescribing some medication. There is a need for immutable history to which none of the parties accessing it can deny or doubt its authenticity.

2. Introduction

• This project aims at creating a non-permissible blockchain which stores the health data of a patient. The blockchain stores the timeline of a person’s medical history. The main business reason behind creating this project was that the current doctor examining the patient can have access to authentic medical history of the patient. Many times, the patient forgets the medications he was given or even some problem he had in the past. So, this blockchain will have the data to overcome that problem. Also, sometimes patient does not want to reveal some information regarding health but hiding any of such details from a doctor may create a problem. So, this project also tackles it.
• Data is stored inside the blockchain after proper mining processes hence the authenticity of data can be trusted. The blockchain also tackles the problem of non-repudiation from a doctor’s end. Maybe some wrong medication or wrong tests have been done or suggested by the doctor then incase if things go haywire, neither the doctor nor the hospital can deny something happening as whatever is stores on blockchain is permanent and authentic.
• The blockchain also provides APIs for 3rd party integration of a hospital so that the hospital can access and store the data over it. As a part of this project, we have also created a web application of a hospital which demonstrates the use of blockchain.

3. Overview

• Blockchain works over various nodes in a distributed environment and are also in sync with each other. New nodes can also register and contribute over the blockchain. On registration they get the latest information and are also part of the distributed system. 3rd party applications can request any service of the blockchain from any of the nodes in the network.

• The reliability of the data is also high since the system is distributed.

• Functionalities provided by blockchain:

  • Save the entry.
  • Mine a block.
  • Access a block.
  • Access history of a patient or doctor.

• This blockchain has 4 key attributes which it maintains inside an entry. All the entries are same as a transaction in generic blockchain.

• Four attributes inside our entry are : patient id, doctor id, description and prescription. Whenever a doctor stores this information inside the blockchain after examining a patient, this information goes inside the pending entries and when the mining process is done by any of the nodes in the blockchain the entries become permanent inside a block.

• After the data is permanent both the doctor and patient can access the history.

• Patient can look at his entire history while a doctor can look at the patients, he has prescribed in the past, but he can get the history of only those patients whose data access is given to him by the patient.

• Apart from this scheduling an appointment with doctor, input of prescription, viewing history, viewing profile and other miscellaneous functionalities are provided out of blockchain as a part of hospital web application. As these features are application specific, they can be built however the 3rd party prefers.

  As part of the web app in our project we have provided the following functionalities:

  • View profile
  • Portal for viewing history. Both patient and doctor.
  • Form input for prescribing patient
  • Viewing appointments.