Pathology

Health informatics

Cryptography

Information sharing

Construct (python library)

Computer network

Mathematics

Economic growth

Access control

Knowledge management

World Wide Web

Mathematical analysis

Health care

Economics

Alternative medicine

Data sharing

Blockchain

Medical information

Computer science

Scheme (mathematics)

Computer security

Medicine

Journal of Medical Systems

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.

MedBlock: Efficient and Secure Medical Data Sharing Via Blockchain