SECURE AND SCALABLE PATIENT DATA MANAGEMENT WITH BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Abstract Electronic health record (EHR) systems are gradually overtaking the tradition of paper-based medical records, in light of enhanced speed, security, and non-duplication of data. Nevertheless, most of the data is still transferred through traditional methods, such as fax and mail. The network solutions for secure and efficient channeling of health data are quite poor, thus impeding urgent care of patients. This paper recommends over a proposal to create the Blockchain-Based Trusted Healthcare Network (BTHN) system to effectively exchange and store large amounts of medical data. Participants in the system, patients, or individuals are retained in control of access to their healthcare records in the clinical setting while participating in granting privacy through decentralized infrastructure. Patients are allowed to give and withdraw consent for access to their records and software interfaces to permit them to visualize their data. To implement storage security of the medical records, the Ethereum network coupled with InterPlanetary File Systems (IPFS) is employed as filesystems, all devised to take full advantage of the potential of blockchain in distributed nature distribution, immutability of the blockchain mechanism, and decentralized storages. Secure data models strictly designed in IPFS and governed by Ethereum smart contracts can support distributed consent to the patient while using the Blockchain-Based Trusted Healthcare Network (BTHN) paradigm. This study examines the possible impacts of blockchain technology on hospital's EHR management, by providing a foolproof strategy for medical records transfer between patients and healthcare providers. In effect, the entire scheme supports the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum platform to ensure a secure, concise issue of data exchange. The system uses smart contracts set off by a simple app to keep track of a patient's treatment and stores patient data rationally on a blockchain network. This helps make patient data files very safe and follow the rules. Medical records are stored at local level in Hardhat server, while the front end of the system was built using React.js library, and the back-end implementation was running on node.js. The smart contract is written in Solidity, an object-oriented programming language, ensuring a complete system that is both relevant for data to be decentralized or not. Embracing role-based access control for improved security and wieldiness, the system indicates linear scaling: the throughput proportional to the number of its users, requests and so on as a great advantage. The minimum recorded latency for the operations is 0.06 ms, which is an exemplification of system responsiveness.