Blockchain-based EHR System for Indian Healthcare Industry using Aadhar

ABSTRACT

In today's world, digital technologies are advancing at a rapid pace. Almost every industry has benefited from this ongoing change. In the health sector, the digitization of medical records was proposed decades ago. Whereas some developed countries have successfully adopted and implemented Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. Developing countries like India still heavily rely on paper-based medical records. Although there are a number of systems for electronic medical record management, they have issues related to interoperability, timely access, and storage. Due to poor infrastructure and design, the current systems are not robust for communicating and tracking medical records. The need for a better EHR system was highly emphasized during the COVID-19 pandemic. The two major shortcomings of the existing system are a lack of interoperability, which causes delays in sharing the information, and a lack of standardization, due to which the data quality of the data that is shared suffers. To mitigate these issues, we need a nationwide EHR system. Another issue is the lack of a ubiquitous UPI (Unique Patient Identifier). In a country like India, the second most populated country in the world, Aadhar is the best option for UPI, which can be used for creating a national EHR system. In this paper, we have presented a framework for a standardized, interoperable, and unified EHR system based on blockchain technology with Aadhar as the UPI. Using blockchain as the base of this model provides numerous advantages over a cloud-based system, like decentralization, better security, immutability, and traceability. © 2023 IEEE.