The problem My-Medi solves

Managing medical records through traditional systems can lead to data breaches, unauthorized access, and lack of control. Patients often find it difficult to securely store, share, and revoke access to their health data. Centralized databases are prone to hacking, and institutions face challenges in maintaining privacy and transparency.

How My-Medi Solves This

My-Medi leverages blockchain technology to create a secure, decentralized platform for managing medical records. The platform ensures that patient data is encrypted and stored safely, giving individuals complete control over their information.

Key Benefits:

• Enhanced Security: Medical records are stored on a decentralized blockchain network, reducing the risk of breaches. Only authorized users can access the data.
• Full Control: Patients can share records with healthcare providers or family members by granting them access via their Ethereum address. Access can be revoked anytime, ensuring complete control over who can see the information.
• Transparency: Every interaction with the records is logged on the blockchain, providing an immutable and transparent history of who accessed the data.
• Ease of Access: Patients can easily upload, view, and manage their records from anywhere, ensuring quick and safe access to their health information whenever needed.
  By ensuring security, providing control, and maintaining transparency, My-Medi makes managing medical records easier and safer for patients and healthcare providers alike.

Challenges I ran into

One of the key challenges during the development of My-Medi was integrating decentralized file storage with blockchain technology. While using Ethereum and Solidity for smart contracts was relatively straightforward, securely storing large medical records required a scalable and decentralized solution. Pinata, a service built on IPFS, was chosen for this purpose. However, getting the file storage and retrieval process to work seamlessly with the blockchain interactions posed multiple hurdles.

Key Challenges:

• Handling Large Files on IPFS: Medical records often come in large sizes, which led to difficulties with upload times and retrieval performance on the decentralized network. To solve this, we implemented file chunking and optimized the code to handle large files efficiently.
• Ensuring Secure Access Control: While blockchain inherently provides security, ensuring only authorized users could access the files stored on IPFS was tricky. We solved this by creating a system where the file metadata and access permissions are recorded on the blockchain, and encryption keys are shared with authorized individuals only.
• Gas Fees for Transactions: Ethereum's network fees can fluctuate significantly, making it expensive to store data or execute smart contracts. To address this, we optimized the smart contract functions to reduce the number of interactions with the blockchain and are also considering Layer 2 solutions for future development.
  Overcoming these challenges required careful optimization of both the frontend and backend, along with thorough testing to ensure a smooth and secure user experience.