Integrating blockchain technology into healthcare systems presents a transformative approach to documenting, storing, and accessing electronic health records (EHRs). This research introduces a novel blockchain-based EHR system designed to significantly enhance security, scalability, and accessibility compared to existing solutions. Current systems primarily utilize SHA-256 for security and either IPFS or centralized storage, which, while effective, have limitations in providing comprehensive data integrity and security. The proposed system leverages a hybrid security algorithm combining Argon2 and AES and integrates a hybrid storage and consensus mechanism utilizing IPFS and PBFT. This multifaceted approach ensures robust encryption, efficient consensus, and high fault tolerance. Furthermore, the system incorporates Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to safeguard against unauthorized access. It utilizes advanced blockchain tools like MetaMask, Ganache, and Truffle to facilitate seamless interaction with the decentralized network. Simulation results demonstrate that this system offers superior protection against data breaches and enhances operational efficiency. Specifically, the proposed hybrid model substantially improves data integrity, consensus efficiency, fault tolerance, data availability, latency, bandwidth utilization, throughput, memory usage, and CPU usage across various healthcare applications. To validate the performance and security of the proposed system, comprehensive analyses were conducted using real-world healthcare scenarios. The findings highlight the significant advantages of the blockchain-based EHR system, emphasizing its potential to revolutionize healthcare data management by ensuring secure, reliable, and efficient handling of sensitive medical information.
Brijwani et al. (Sun,) studied this question.