Developing a Healthcare Blockchain Solution

Healthcare Blockchain – Healthcare industry uses digital methods for maintaining electronic health records.

From the patient’s personal information to diagnostic reports, and doctor’s prescriptions, healthcare organizations, currently use the centralized database for saving data.



Health Information Exchange is another time-consuming and complicated process that leads to high healthcare cost.

According to 2016 Breach Barometer Report, 450 breach incidents occurred but the information was only available for 380 breach incidents and, the breaches resulted in 27,314,647 affected patient records. Could decentralization solve the data security issues in healthcare? Is it possible to save data securely on the blockchain healthcare?


Blockchain will have a considerable impact on a patient’s record sharing, billing, and medical research.

Read further to understand how a blockchain healthcare solution can be built to improve the management of the patient’s health record.

Here is a demo application showcasing how a user can access medical health record from a mobile app.


Demo: Medical Record Keeping Application built on Blockchain.

Blockchain enabled patient health record management solution

Author’s Bio

Akash Takyar
Akash Takyar
CEO LeewayHertz

1. Data generation

To integrate blockchain in healthcare, first, we need to understand the scope of data and where and how it is being generated.

At every stage of medical treatment, whether it is a consultation, diagnosis, or surgery, healthcare companies generate sensitive and crucial medical data.

healthcare blockchain

The medical data includes the doctor’s prescriptions, X-rays, MRI scans, ultrasound reports, angiography, radiography, endoscopy, and so on. Healthcare data comes in various formats like text, paper, numeric, pictures, videos, digital, or multimedia.

IDC reveals healthcare data is expected to grow to 2,314 exabytes by 2020.

Though healthcare centers are adopting digital technologies, the patient’s medical records are currently stored in the centralized servers. It creates an attack surface for hackers. Accenture’s survey claims one in five employees working in the healthcare is willing to sell the sensitive medical data to the unauthorized parties.


2. Data Enrichment- Before storing data to the blockchain

Data Enrichment is a process to add value to enhance data quality.

Patient’s health records need to be accurate, secure, understandable, time-stamped, and structured.

Storing unstructured data could lead to inconsistencies, delays in the treatment process, and inefficiencies.

It is essential to implement the following three steps to clean and secure the data before storing it on the blockchain.


a. Replace the patient’s identity with the public hash key

A person’s identity can be replaced by a hash, a unique numerical value. Replacing the user’s identity with a hash would make it impossible for the attacker to decode the identity and protected health information (PHI). De-identifying the data will remove details including the patient’s name, address, social security number and financial information.


b. Make it compliance ready

Saving data on blockchain doesn’t mean no-compliance. In fact, blockchain will make compliance enforcement more seamless and transparent. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) Compliance ensures the protection of patient’ data. Healthcare vendor that deals with patient’s protected health information should follow HIPAA’s security measures.

HIPAA’s privacy rule allows all the involved members to access and disclose only de-identified data. It is essential that the compliance check is maintained before the health records get saved on the blockchain.

c. Add meta information and structure it for computation

Medical data categorized in multiple formats like administrative claim record, clinical registries, biometric data, patient-reported data, or medical imaging should be stored in a structured way.

Organized data enables all healthcare providers to access data efficiently.




3. Storing health records on healthcare blockchain

Blockchain can eliminate the risks associated with centralization of data by storing the digital health records across multiple nodes within the network.

Here’s how Blockchain in healthcare could work

To illustrate how could blockchain healthcare manage the medical records, we have further divided this module into four steps:

a. Health organizations store information on the blockchain
Healthcare vendors can save health records with the patient’s public key on the blockchain. Smart contracts get triggered to store the information provided by doctors, diagnostic centers, or health insurance companies on the blockchain.

b. Transactions are completed and identified uniquely
Transactions containing patient’s health records are saved on the blockchain with their unique IDs and patient’s public key. If a healthcare provider wants to access a patient’s public non-identifiable data, the transaction ID is matched, and the information is displayed.

c. Healthcare units can directly query the blockchain
Unlike the traditional process, doctors or health insurance companies don’t need to approach a patient for accessing their health records. Healthcare institutes can submit their queries via APIs and access the patient’s non-identifiable information through smart contracts.

d. Patients can share their public key with health organizations
Healthcare blockchain solution can never reveal the patient’s identifiable information until they provide their public key. Patients can share the public key with the health organizations if required. Data would always remain non-identifiable to healthcare providers without the private key. It is similar to how cryptocurrencies are stored on the blockchain, where the owner with the public key can only access it.

A blockchain can either be a public or a private blockchain. Since a user identity will not be visible in this solution, a public blockchain could also be used.

Once the data is stored, it can be consumed by different blockchain healthcare vendors using smart contracts.

4. Data consumption with Smart contracts

Smart contracts ensure the enforcement of the business rules, compliance requirement, and the user’s will before the data is shared or retrieved.

Stakeholders involved in the patient’s treatment can consume the stored data with the patient’s consent.

Let’s understand how different healthcare providers could consume data using smart contracts:

a. When the data is saved on the blockchain, smart contracts are triggered.

b. Healthcare provider receives the patient’s report with a hash that hides the identity.

c. Whenever a diagnostic lab or any other healthcare provider would request to access the patient’s health records, smart contracts notify the patients.

Smart contracts contain business logic about who gets what.

Insurance companies could only access the information related to billing and patient’s diagnostic reports, but no other details such as doctor’s notes or prescriptions.

Similarly, physicians in the healthcare centers could access relevant information such as the patient’s historical health records, age, and diagnostic reports.

Patients would have ownership of the data, i.e., they can decide what information to be shared with which entity using smart contracts.



5. Data Mining and AI in Healthcare Blockchain


But the centralized approach for maintaining the data could hinder the patient’s privacy. Blockchain could be leveraged to bring trust in the clinical trials and medical research process.

As discussed above, the blockchain healthcare platform could use de-identification for hiding the patient’s identity. So, medical research companies could utilize the non-identifiable records to carry out the research activities.

For example, if a research company wants to get the analytics for HIV disease, smart contracts would enable them to access details like HIV type, most-affected city or country, age group, and gender while hiding the personal information of patients.

Using Data Mining and AI along with the blockchain, research companies could discover the relevant data from the large data sets stored on the blockchain.

Here’s what benefits could Blockchain bring to the Healthcare Industry

  • Simplified Approach to Data
  • System Interoperability
    The inability to exchange healthcare records could lead to delays in treatment. But blockchain could alleviate this problem by decentralizing the data. Everyone within the healthcare network could access a transparent, yet immutable ledger while having the ownership of data.
  • Efficiency
    Blockchain in healthcare could turn the system highly efficient via real-time processing. It could remove the need for third-party companies, hence, eradicating the delays in accessing the data.
  • Control over the data
    Anyone willing to access the health records would require the patient’s public key. Patients could seamlessly control who should access what data.
    Since the data is saved in encrypted form, it remains unreadable to the hackers.



We hope that you’ve got a better understanding of how blockchain technology combined with AI and IoT can be irresistible for the healthcare industry. AI-enabled automated health checks reducing cost and time; patients’ immutable health records stored securely on blockchain and millions of devices performing precise diagnoses and finding better – the future of healthcare can be witnessed soon. 

The use cases of blockchain in healthcare are endless and we may find new applications emerging in the market with each passing day. 

If you are looking for a blockchain development company to develop a healthcare blockchain solution, you can discuss your requirement with our team of experts. 

Author’s Bio

Akash Takyar
Akash Takyar
CEO LeewayHertz
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