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MedBlock: Efficient and Secure Medical Data Sharing Via Blockchain

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Abstract

With the development of electronic information technology, electronic medical records (EMRs) have been a common way to store the patients’ data in hospitals. They are stored in different hospitals’ databases, even for the same patient. Therefore, it is difficult to construct a summarized EMR for one patient from multiple hospital databases due to the security and privacy concerns. Meanwhile, current EMRs systems lack a standard data management and sharing policy, making it difficult for pharmaceutical scientists to develop precise medicines based on data obtained under different policies. To solve the above problems, we proposed a blockchain-based information management system, MedBlock, to handle patients’ information. In this scheme, the distributed ledger of MedBlock allows the efficient EMRs access and EMRs retrieval. The improved consensus mechanism achieves consensus of EMRs without large energy consumption and network congestion. In addition, MedBlock also exhibits high information security combining the customized access control protocols and symmetric cryptography. MedBlock can play an important role in the sensitive medical information sharing.

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Funding

This study was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2017YFB0802300), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61772403 and No. U1401251), Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (No. 2017JM6004), and National 111 Program of China B16037 and B08038.

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Correspondence to Kai Fan.

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Kai Fan declares that he has no conflict of interest. Shangyang Wang declares that he has no conflict of interest. Yanhui Ren declares that he has no conflict of interest. Hui Li declares that he has no conflict of interest. Yintang Yang declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement

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Fan, K., Wang, S., Ren, Y. et al. MedBlock: Efficient and Secure Medical Data Sharing Via Blockchain. J Med Syst 42, 136 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-0993-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-0993-7

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