MRex
A decentralized and secure platform to store your medical records
Created on 13th November 2021
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MRex
A decentralized and secure platform to store your medical records
The problem MRex solves
The Problem
Understandably so, any user would be skeptical of trusting an unknown organization with their medical records. Medical records hold highly sensitive information about the health of a person. In the wrong hands, the situation can be lead to making the user subject to exploitation. MRex addresses that by creating a highly secure and decentralized system to store medical reports that can only be accessed by the intended users.
Why MRex
Essentially, think of MRex and our use of IPFS as a place where the medical records are stored, the links to which are publicly accessible. However, there's a catch! There is virtually no way to access these records in an intelligible format. Our platform encrypts all the reports and uploads on IPFS. Only the report's owner can get it decrypted on our application. As an additional feature, they can grant access to any trusted user by entering their email.
How We're Different
Government websites are seldom the most reliable. This could look like anything from server errors where users would have to wait an extended period of time to get access to time-sensitive information, or loss of information during transfer. Despite this, only about 1 in 5 people actually notice these errors. When in the context of something as crucial as health information, this is far from ideal. We at MRex make sure that these technical errors never are an issue, and the user has a seamless experience when using our product.
Indian Adoption
The adoption of Electronic Medical Reports (EMR) is very tragic in India in comparison to the rest of the world. MRex offers an effortless experience, while boosting EMR adoption rates.
Conclusion
All in all, our features, reliability, and ease of use makes MRex THE platform for users to streamline their confidential medical information in a decentralized system.
Challenges we ran into
Encryption/Decrpyption
The team had some trouble figuring out the encryption and decryption aspects of our reports. While not the easiest, figuring out encryption was not the most difficult feat. Decryption, on the other hand, was relatively more complex and took us a day's time.
TS to JS
Initially, we coded our backend in typescript, but then had to migrate to javascript due to the constraints thrown at us by IPFS which does not support typescript.
Giving Access
The team was clear during ideation that a major selling point of our project would be how the reports are only accessible to the intended authorized users. The actual implementation of this, however, took a good amount of brainstorming.
Report Deletion
The reports and the accounts that the reports are accessible share a many-to-many relation in the backend. On deletion of a report, it was easy to delete the report itself but that wasn't the case with the accounts that the report has been shared with. In the backend, it took a considerable amount of brain-racking to know that the shared report has been deleted.
Connecting The App And The Api
Our app is built on React Native, and our backend is mostly built on Node.js.
The main issue we faced when building our product was connecting these two, as our app simulators did not support localhost ports, we had to use NGROK to connect the app and the api, which made it relatively difficult to collaborate.
Technologies used