Blockchain-Enabled Electronic Health Record Model for Managing Patients' Vital Data and Medical Reports

The Internet of Medical Things is revolutionizing the concept of patient care. It is empowering the implementation of remote patient care protocols through the use of body sensors to monitor vital signs. However, it produces vast amounts of information, which raises security and privacy concerns. High-dimensional medical data are essential for diagnosis and treatment, but they are not currently connected to blockchain-based electronic health record systems. To overcome these limitations, the authors present a Hyperledger Fabric-based secure remote patient monitoring model for storing and retrieving medical imaging. The system records patient vital signs using sensors and stores medical images off-chain in the InterPlanetary File System. This model uses two organizations and a single channel, with Raft consensus, to ensure data consistency and high performance. Additionally, this study evaluates the performance of the proposed system in terms of throughput and latency. A test was conducted at 1,200 transactions with varying transfer rates. The results reveal that the throughput was near the send rate, up to 90 TPS. At a send rate of 150 TPS, the system reaches its peak throughput of 117.04 TPS. Moreover, no transactions were lost, which means that the system was able to make all its transactions, representing system reliability. The latency was noted to be 0.21 to 2.24 s, whereas the read operation was always characterized by the same latency of 0.01 s.