MedBloc: A Blockchain-Based Secure EHR System for Sharing and Accessing Medical Data

In New Zealand, there is currently no shared Electronic Health Record (EHR) system integrated between major healthcare organisations, such as hospitals, medical centres, and specialists. Thanks to its characteristics, blockchain technology can be a suitable platform for building a large-scale EHR system for New Zealand. In this paper, we present MedBloc, a blockchain-based secure EHR system that enables patients and healthcare providers to access and share health records in a usable yet privacy-preserving manner. MedBloc captures a longitudinal view of the patient's health story and enables patients to give or withdraw consent for regulating access to their records. To protect medical data, MedBloc uses an encryption mechanism and enforces a smart contract based access control mechanism for regulating access. MedBloc not only demonstrates how the blockchain can establish New Zealand's first shared EHR system but it shows how blockchain can potentially disrupt the entire medical technology domain.