Second International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Sustainable Systems (ICAISS 2023)

IEEE Xplore Part Number : CFP23CB2-ART ; ISBN : 979-8-3503-2579-9

Digital Health Data Supervision using Blockchain

in Ethereum Testnet
2023 Second International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Sustainable Systems (ICAISS) | 979-8-3503-2579-9/23/$31.00 ©2023 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICAISS58487.2023.10250620

2Fancy C* 3Lukesh

1Harshit Agrawal Department of Networking and Department of Networking and

Department of Networking and Communications Communications
Communications SRM Institute of Science and SRM Institute of Science and
SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur Technology, Kattankulathur
Technology, Kattankulathur Chengalpet, India Chengalpet, India
Chengalpet, India *Corresponding author email: [email protected]
[email protected]

Abstract—In current systems, patients’ data and that will store patients’ medical data. The focus of this
information that are critical are scattered across different research is to shift from a provider-centric approach (as with
systems and institutions. Due to this, non-trivial data is not the traditional systems) to a patient-centric approach. This
handily available or accessible when needed. Such problems
research expects to address this issue by moving from
related to patient healthcare data can be handled effectively
centralized databases to blockchain-based data storage
using blockchain solutions. This ever-increasing data leads to
problems in managing patient information within clinics and systems. This type of database that is distributed will help
hospitals. Our project aims to create a hash for individual eliminate the giant organizations and bring the power back to
patient health information blocks. It would also permit patients the actual users. This approach will help security,
to keep their identity secret and reveal the necessary immutability, and authorized access to the patients of their
information to third parties at the same time. The access medical data.
permissions and time limit for data sharing can also be
controlled by them. A platform called “Ethereum” will be used There are a bunch of software and databases currently that are
as the blockchain technology to create an application that will being used to store medical data [4].
store patients’ data securely in the blockchain. A contract-based
Interoperability is one of the issues described in the paper
language called “Solidity” will be used to bind each patient’ data
written by Peng Zhang [4], who classifies it into three types.
with their unique addresses to the blockchain and to provide
functionalities to the application. A browser-based user- Interoperability Level, Foundational, Structural, Semantic.
interface will be developed to be used by the users that will However, the problem with current systems is that they are
connect with the blockchain internally. controlled by some kind of central authority. Moreover, the
data is distributed among different organizations that cause
accessibility issues when needed.
Keywords—health care, blockchain, patient records, security,
digital data, storing Because of this, patients must collect their medical data
from various places when going for further treatment. In
I. INTRODUCTION addition to that, the data is not secure and susceptible to
A blockchain can be referred to as a distributed ledger [1]. It mutation. It can also be misused by third parties. Thus, the
enables data sharing in a network of peers. It was introduced data is not in the control of the patients. It is also not easy to
along with Bitcoin and. It solved an enduring problem of the
manage since most of the data is paper-based.
double-spend problem. Cryptocurrency was the first domain
where blockchain technology was applied. However,
introducing cryptocurrency is optional in order to use
blockchain. Decentralized applications can be built even II. RELATED WORKS
without the use of cryptocurrency.
A blockchain can be regarded as a chain made of blocks This section gives a detailed view on the related
which are linked together using cryptographic hashes and are works. Blockchain innovation empowers a decentralized and
time-stamped [2,3]. These blocks are locked in an immutable distributed network environment with no requirement for a
and secure manner. The chain constantly grows with time as
central entity. Transactions are secure as well as trustworthy
new nodes are added every few seconds.
due to the utilization of cryptographic standards. Lately,
The fundamental thought of this research is to create blockchain innovation has turned out to be popular, trendy,
a decentralized Electronic health records (EHR) application and has infiltrated various areas, generally because of the

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 Second International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Sustainable Systems (ICAISS 2023)
IEEE Xplore Part Number : CFP23CB2-ART ; ISBN : 979-8-3503-2579-9

prevalence of digital forms of money. One field where The focus of this report is the application of blockchain in the
blockchain innovation has gigantic potential is healthcare EHR systems. However, it faces many challenges like
because of the requirement for a more patient-centric way to security and design of the system.
deal with healthcare systems and to increase the
The current systems use centralized databases to
interoperability of the systems and increase the precision of
store patients’ medical data which are in control of the big
Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs). Based on this, a
institutions scattered across various departments. The major
survey was done [5], an analysis of the no of increasing
issues thus created are include Inconsistency in medical data,
interest of blockchain technologies in the healthcare domain.
the data is mutable, Lack of security [12], Unavailability of
Firstly, web crawling was done to identify the papers related
data when in need, the data can be used without the patient’s
to the blockchain which were further filtered based on the
consent, much of the data is in paper form.
specific healthcare domain.
The research demonstrated that blockchain innovation in
medicinal services is expanding and it is for the most part III. PROPOSED MODEL
utilized for information sharing, overseeing health records, This section explains the proposed model in detail. The
and access control. Other scenarios are extremely proposed system will have a backend part that will be done in
uncommon. Given below is the graphical representation of blockchain technology [13]. The front-end part of the
the no of different types of papers growing over each year. It application will be used by the users to interact with the
is expected that this no will increase in the coming years. application directly. It will be made using angular.
Sergey Avdoshin proposes a few use cases of the blockchain The new system proposed in the report makes use of the third
technology in the healthcare domain in his paper [6,7]. The generation of web i.e., decentralized web.
broad use cases are: -
The application is hosted on the Ethereum blockchain [14].
i. Blockchain for Electronic Medical Records – Blockchain
The backend is developed using a contract-based language
can be used to store digital medical records of patient data in
“Solidity” specific to the Ethereum blockchain.
a decentralized system. This system is believed to be of great
benefit as it guarantees data integrity and protects patient The frontend of the application is browser-based using web
privacy. languages like HTML, CSS, JS [15]. We have used the
Angular framework to better manage the application and for
ii. Blockchain for Tracking and Tracing Medical Fraud –
testing purposes.
The market is flooded with fake medical drugs. Blockchain
can be used to move the fake drugs out of the picture by The frontend will communicate with the blockchain using
tracking the drugs from their manufacture to their web3.js library.
distribution. This will also help the country from an
Given below is a minimal overview of the application
economical point of view.
depicting the way the system will work.
iii. Blockchain for Artificial Intelligence – AI can be used
Fig
for the analysis of complex medical data. This requires a huge
amount of data with a diverse range to ensure accuracy and
obtain effective results. Blockchain can provide a platform
[8] where patients, with the help of an advanced AI doctor,
can discuss their medical data and get proper results.
Moreover, this huge generated data can also be used as
training sets for the AI systems.
iv. Blockchain for Secure and Guaranteed Payments –
Financial sectors were the first domain in which Blockchain
technology was used and it has proved to be very successful
[9]. Even for healthcare applications, Blockchain can
facilitate payment of fees for treatments.
v. Blockchain for Medical Research – Because of the large
Fig 1 A Dapp user data flow overview
audience and huge amount of generated data, it will not
become easy to find people who fit a certain medical history
or and has the potential for clinical trials. They can even be IV. IMPLEMENTATION AND ANALYSIS
incentivized with this platform [10,11]. Moreover, abundant
data will be available that can boost the medical research.

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 Second International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Sustainable Systems (ICAISS 2023)
IEEE Xplore Part Number : CFP23CB2-ART ; ISBN : 979-8-3503-2579-9

1. CHOOSING THE BLOCKCHAIN 5. INTERACTION BETWEEN BROWSER AND

BLOCKCHAIN
The first implementation of the blockchain was Bitcoin
whose use case is purely financial. It is used to exchange Web3.js is a JavaScript library that is used by the
money in a digital currency form called ‘Bitcoin’. However, browsers to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. It can also
in the past decade, many other blockchains have come up. interact with smart contracts and thus acts as a bridge between
Some of them are purely financial, on the other hand, others browsers and Ethereum blockchain. We will be using this
can be used to create decentralized applications. Ethereum library for all the interactions with the local blockchain with
and Hyperledger and two of the most widely known our front-end code.
blockchain platforms that can be used to create decentralized
applications. Hyperledger is generally used for creating
private blockchain applications. Our requirement is that of a 6. FRONT END
public application. That is why we have chosen the Ethereum The front-end code will be written using the Angular
platform for creating our dapp. framework. Angular is a framework that is used to build web
applications for mobile and desktop. It provides a platform
that separates the view and data logic and combines
2. ETHEREUM TESTNET
declarative templates, dependency injection, end to end
The project will be developed using Ethereum blockchain tooling, and integrated best practices. We are using angular
technology. For this, we need a blockchain to deploy and test because it supports easy pluggable libraries through node.js
our application throughout the development phase. Using the features. We can easily use web3.js and other libraries and
real Ethereum blockchain will cost a lot of money, so we have keep our bundle size to the minimum.
used Ganache. Ganache is a personal blockchain that runs on
One more feature of Angular is that it uses Typescript, which
the local machine and can be used to deploy contracts, run
is a superscript of JavaScript. It leads to a much cleaner and
applications, and test them. It is available both as a desktop
efficient code.
application and a command-line tool. By default, it provides
10 accounts with 100 ethers each that we can use for Angular has a built-in server that opens at localhost:4200
transactions. We can see block history, events, logs, etc. which can be used to deploy the application. It also provides
the Karma server that can be used to unit test the application
using Jasmine testing.
3. META MASK
Metamask is a browser extension that is specifically
used for enabling the browsers to interact with the Ethereum
blockchain. It uses 12 words seed phrase which is used to
generate random accounts. We can also recover our accounts
with the seed phrase and password at any time. Metamask
allows us to interact with the real Ethereum network or test
networks, or even instances running in the local machine-like
Ganache. We will be using this extension to run our
application in the local machine in the port 8545.

4. WRITING SMART CONTRACTS

A smart contract is an agreement between two or
third parties written in the form of code. Decentralized
applications are defined by smart contracts. These smart
contracts specify the rules/logic of the application so that it
can work in a trustless environment. Solidity is a language for
Ethereum blockchain that can be used to code smart
contracts. We have used Solidity to write the logic for our Fig 2. System architecture diagram
application. Its syntax is similar to JavaScript and C++.

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 Second International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Sustainable Systems (ICAISS 2023)
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I. RESULTS Whenever the user sends a request to initiate a transaction in

the blockchain, the Metamask extension in his browser will
Below we have given the screenshots of the different modules
pop up asking for the confirmation. It will also show the
and functionalities of the project executed from the chrome
details like the gas cost, ether, etc.
browser and ganache as the local Ethereum network.

1. FRONT END OF THE APPLICATION

The user will land on the page that shows him his
medical records that have been added by various providers
and was accepted by him.

Fig 3. Medical History Records

Fig 6. Metamask popup for confirming new transaction

The user can click on ‘View Details’ to view more details on

that record. 2. BACK END OF THE APPLICATION

For the back end, we are using ‘Ganache’ as the local

Ethereum test network where we can see the transactions,
blocks, and more details. By default, Ganache provides us
with 10 accounts with 100 eth each.
As the transactions are approved, the blocks get created. We
can also see which transactions were contact creating and
which were contract calls.
Fig 4. Individual Medical Records Page

The user can also navigate to the pending medical approvals

page where he can approve or deny a new record to be added.

Fig 7. Block mining in Ganache

V. CONCLUSION:
Blockchain innovation is slowly ending up
mainstream. The blockchain has huge advantages, from
decentralization to protection and affordability, to security
and immutability. Both experts and associations will
Fig 5. New medical data waiting for approval
certainly work quicker and more effectively, concerning how
safe and reliable the data accessibility is. It can prove to be a

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 Second International Conference on Augmented Intelligence and Sustainable Systems (ICAISS 2023)
IEEE Xplore Part Number : CFP23CB2-ART ; ISBN : 979-8-3503-2579-9

revolutionary change in the industry of healthcare with [6] Sergey Avdoshin, Elena Pesotskaya, “Blockchain
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Paper November 2016.
The application focuses on the patient-centric approach rather
than the provider-centric approach. It transfers the control of [9] Zhang, P. White, J. Schmidt, D.C., and Lenaz, “Applying
the data back to the patients in comparison to the current Software Patters to address interoperability in
systems in which all the data resides with the institutions. Blockchain-based healthcare apps,” arXiv preprint arXiv:
Now, the data is readily and immediately accessible, all in 1706.03700, 2017.
one place without compromising the security. This [10] Middleton B., Bloomrosen M., Dente M.A., Hashmat B.,
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their medical records. Now, they don’t have to be worried T., Weaver C., Zhang J., “Enhancing patient safety and
about paper-based records while visiting different providers. quality of care by improving the usability of electronic
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