Decentralized digital health ecosystems: a unified architecture for AI-enhanced medical record management

Traditional Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems suffer from critical vulnerabilities in security, interoperability, and patient data control. This paper introduces PolyMed, a novel decentralized platform designed to address these challenges. PolyMed combines blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and edge computing into a synergistic architecture. It uses the Polygon blockchain for immutable record-keeping and a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) for transparent governance. Patient identity is secured through privacy-preserving zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and anchored to non-transferable Soulbound Tokens (SBTs), granting users true sovereignty over their data. The platform also includes a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) module to improve healthcare accessibility. Empirical evaluations on the Polygon Mainnet confirm the system's viability, showing sub-4-second transaction latencies and over 90% cost savings compared to legacy systems. The integrated AI model, leveraging a LightGBM classifier on a rich set of engineered features, achieves an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of <b>0.8543</b> and an accuracy of <b>80.33%</b> in emergency detection, demonstrating high reliability on a clinically relevant and imbalanced dataset. By aligning with global standards like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), PolyMed offers an integrated platform for patient-centric digital health management.