MediBlock is an online portal that maintains a digital copy of a patient’s medical history, along with all of their diagnosis and prescriptions. Over the years, several instances of healthcare data violations have challenged the idea of keeping patient health records in one central location. There has been a slight increase in healthcare data breaches in the United States in the past 10 years.
Our front end will be a web app where patients will input their medical details. We will store all the data on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS will generate unique hash values for each record which will be stored on the blockchain. Using the public key the patient can give health intermediaries access to their personal health record; This is stored as an immutable record/transaction on the blockchain. The decentralized nature of the technology creates one ecosystem of patient data that can be quickly and efficiently referenced by doctors, hospitals, health intermediaries, and anyone else involved in treatment.
Moreover, our implementation involves providing the users complete access to their Personal Health Records(PHRs) and accessibility with the power of decentralization and content-based addressing. The patient has full access to their PHRs and shares access to the same with any health intermediary of choice. Every patient can access the web application and register by providing the respective information. The following user can share the link of existing PHRs uploaded on the application i.e perform a transaction only having a verified Metamask wallet. The process of sharing the PHR access is rendered to be complete and verified only after authorization by all nodes.
A Subscription model is also proposed which first offers a 15-day free trial period to new users. If one wishes to continue using the platform's services, one will have to get a premium subscription which is far more efficient with respect to storage and network/transaction fees.
Challenges we ran into:-
Connecting Polygon with Metamask:-
This problem was particularly faced when we tried to connect our Polygon smart contract deployment with
Metamask cryptowallet provider. The issue was a roadblock in the deployment process as it didn't allow any
user to interact with the app functionalities. However, we resolved the issue by setting different configuration settings
for the deployed app.
IPFS/ Filecoin usage in the application:-
Our application utilize Interplanetary File Storage (IPFS) to store all patient healthcare information alongwith
supporting medical document in a secure encrypted form. The previous version of the application leveraged a personal
server setup on localhost environment to store all critical information on the P2P network, however when we tried to scale
the application for deployment process we faced a challenge in establishing IPFS / Filecoin remote node connection via third
party applications such as Infura.
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