Improving Electronic Health Record Security with Blockchain: A Comprehensive Analysis of Current Innovations and Future Directions

Healthcare organizations have challenges with electronic health records (EHRs), which digitize medical data. Doctors and patients spend a significant amount of time accessing EHRs for information, but if the data is irrelevant, access can be denied. Sharing and maintaining medical records is critical in healthcare. Losing patients’ privacy and accurate medical information would be disastrous. This is one of the primary reasons why EHRs must be secure. Modern healthcare infrastructure is notoriously inefficient in terms of data integrity, security, and privacy. However, well-managed and monitored EHRs may alleviate security and complexity concerns. The blockchain’s decentralization and integrity enable this in healthcare. The healthcare delivery system has inherent data management, validation, and dissemination problems. Blockchain technology enhances access to pharmaceuticals, hospital assets, drug systems, patient data, and other healthcare data management resources. It could improve healthcare by providing doctors with immediate access to their patients’ medical histories, which is critical for prescription medications. Thus, a blockchain-based medical record verification and security solution is required. This chapter focuses on developing a permissioned blockchain-based ciphertext policy-attribute encryption system to safeguard personal information and limit access to medical records. When all attributes are refined during encryption, the meta-heuristic model improves. Optimization lowers ciphertext size, encryption costs, and communication costs. Finally, performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method is as reliable and robust as cutting-edge designs.