Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) crave innovation. Years of regulation have stifled tech development in medical data management, while an array of incompatible back-end systems and fragmented data trails limit patients’ ability to engage with their medical history. We demonstrate MedRec as a solution tuned to the needs of patients, the treatment community, and medical researchers. MedRec applies novel, blockchain smart contracts to create a decentralized content-management system for your healthcare data, across providers. The MedRec authentication log governs medical record access, while providing means for auditability and data sharing. A modular design integrates with providers’ existing, local data storage solutions, enabling interoperability and making our system convenient and adaptable. As a key feature of our work, we engage the medical research community with an integral role in the protocol. Medical researchers provide the “mining” necessary to secure and sustain the authentication log on a private, Ethereum network, in return for privacy-preserving, medical metadata in the form of “transaction fees.”
