Designing efficient patient‐centric smart contracts for healthcare ecosystems with access control capabilities

Abstract

AbstractElectronic medical records are a patient's digital asset that enhances the information available to doctors for tracking their patients' health. When this information is stored in a secure environment, health examination reports can serve as a dependable repository for thorough observation of a patient's well‐being. However, it is crucial for the owner to have control over access to these repositories. In this scenario, a blockchain ecosystem with appropriate access control mechanisms can help create a distributed and decentralized storage platform to ensure the safety and security of data. Developing cost‐effective smart contracts and creating clear design diagrams to represent them are essential for establishing such an ecosystem. This paper introduces a smart contract for the Ethereum blockchain that allows an owner to maintain control over their data. The paper presents a diagram for visually representing the modules within our smart contract, providing readers with a clearer understanding of the access control techniques utilized in implementing our strategies. Our smart contract offers clinicians a valuable means of accessing historical data to promptly evaluate a patient's health in emergency situations. We showcase its efficacy by illustrating how it streamlines insurance claims, where it verifies the patient's coverage and automatically authorizes medical expense payments. Lastly, a study is presented to showcase an effective method of storing the ingested data within the Ethereum network. The suggested approach allows restrictions on data visibility based on the viewer's accessibility through identity‐based access control achieved using additional structures in smart contracts. These structures store filtered records accessible to users based on their viewing privileges. The simulated test bed results support the efficiency of using smart contracts with additional structures in terms of gas consumption when compared to those that use a single structure for read and write operations.