Integrating Blockchain Technology into Healthcare

One of the major challenges in the healthcare industry is the information sharing and patient's privacy. The implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) [30] in 1996 made difficult for software vendors to manage the documents and records of the patients. Blockchain based technology, which uses cryptography to facilitate exchange and transaction of values and goods over a network, has been proposed to resolve this issue. The decentralized ledge of blockchain would provide immutability, confidentiality, accountability and transparency for information sharing between healthcare stakeholders. In this paper, we implemented the Ethereum Smart Contract, an extended part of the blockchain in healthcare industry with objectives of keeping all the records and transactions safe and secure, and at the same time, reducing the number of user data breaches. We carried out a number of experiments in order to demonstrate the usability and efficiency of our proposed approach.