MRDACE: An Intelligent Architecture For Secure Sharing And Traceability Of The Medical Images And Patients’ Records

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has laid down several ethical and legal obligations on healthcare providers to preserve the privacy and confidentiality of patient information. Digitization in healthcare has been of great help to the medical fraternity and the patients, however, digital-based services in healthcare have also widened the spectrum of vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based system to trace the data collection, storing, and sharing process for medical records. We present an Architecture of Medical Records Data Accountability and Compliance (MRDACE) which is a decentralized permissioned data-sharing platform. The Medical Images and Information of a patient will be under the sole ownership of the patient. Logs of any access made to the Medical Images and Information of a patient will be maintained and cannot be modified, leading to a transparent traceability mechanism. This architecture utilizes the Proof-of-Authority consensus algorithm and further introduces a new automated incentive function to decide upon the access rights of the Data requestors. In comparison to the existing state-of-art solutions, it performs with 56.71% less gas since the automated function introduced removes the need for the patient consent to share the health records with the Data requestors.