Towards a Blockchain-based Medical Test Results Management System: A Case Study in Vietnam

Abstract

The role of the testing process cannot be denied in the diagnosis and treatment of patients' diseases in medical facilities today. The results from this process help doctors and nurses in medical centers make a preliminary and detailed assessment of symptoms and provide a specific course of treatment for their patients. In addition, these results are stored as a patient's medical record that serves as a reference for subsequent therapies. However, the storage of this information (i.e., paper-based, electronic-based) faces some difficulties for both approaches. Especially for developing countries (i.e., Vietnam), this process encounters some major obstacles at health centers in rural areas. Many centralized/decentralized storage methods have been proposed to solve the above problem. Besides, the current popular method is patient-centered (all information shared is decided by the patient) can solve the above problems and be applied by many research directions. However, these methods require the user (i.e., patient) to have a background in security and privacy as well as the cutting-edge technologies installed on their phones. This is extremely difficult to apply in rural areas in developing countries where people are not yet conscious of protecting their personal information. This paper proposes a mechanism for storing and managing test results of patients at medical centers based on blockchain technology -applicable to developing countries. We build a proof-of-concept based on the Hyperledger Fabric platform and exploit the Hyperledger Caliper to evaluate a variety of scenarios related to system performance (i.e., create, query, and update).