Toward a Blockchain-Based Technology in Dealing with Emergencies in Patient-Centered Healthcare Systems.

Nowadays, medical healthcare always plays a vital role for humans in society, especially problems related to personal health records due to its security and sensitivity. For each patient, personal health records are critical and vital assets, so how to manage them effectively is becoming exciting research to solve. Many types of research in aspects of managing and operating personal health records have been introduced; however, dealing with patients’ data in emergency cases remains an uncertain issue. When emergencies happen in reality, using a traditional access system is very hard for patients to give consent to staff to access their data. Besides, there is no secured record management of patient’ data, which reveals highly confidential personal information, such as what happened, when, and who has access to such information. Therefore, in this paper, an emergency access control management system is proposed to protect the patients’ data. This system is built based on permissioned Blockchain Hyperledger fabric. The proposed system will define several rules and regulations by using smart contracts and time duration to deal with emergencies. The patients also restrict the time to access the data in such urgent cases. Several algorithms that represent how the system works are also provided to make readers understand about the proposed management system.