Article
SECURE DECENTRALIZED HEALTH RECORD SYSTEM LEVERAGING BLOCKCHAIN AND IPFS
Modern healthcare systems often rely on centralized storage for Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which introduces several critical vulnerabilities, including single points of failure, potential data tampering, and risks to patient privacy. This research proposes a decentralized EHR management framework that integrates blockchain technology with the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) to securely handle doctor–patient appointment details, medical reports, prescriptions, and patient feedback. A permissioned Ethereum-like smart contract named “Healthcare” is utilized to immutably store user profiles, appointment metadata, prescription references, and ratings on the blockchain. Sensitive files are encrypted using AES-CTR with keys derived via PBKDF2 and then pinned to a local IPFS node to ensure distributed, confidential file storage. Patients can register, log in, view a list of doctors with on-chain average ratings, book appointments by uploading encrypted reports, and later retrieve prescriptions in decrypted form. Doctors access the system to view appointments, download encrypted medical reports, upload encrypted prescriptions, and publish relevant metadata on-chain. Patient feedback is also recorded as immutable blockchain transactions. An in-memory Python-based caching layer helps improve performance by reducing the need for repeated on-chain reads. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of encryption, decryption, and IPFS pinning operations, confirming the system’s performance reliability. This framework strengthens healthcare data management by ensuring transparency, data integrity, and fault tolerance. The combination of blockchain-based metadata storage and off-chain encrypted file hosting through IPFS enables secure, decentralized, and patient-centric healthcare services
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