A Distributed Ledger Architecture for Secure Medical Record Exchange Across Heterogeneous Healthcare Networks

International Journal of Computer Science and Technology | Vol. 12, No. 6, June 2010 | pp. 41–48

DOI: 10.46882/2010/IJCST/000091

Article Type: Original Research Paper

Title: A Distributed Ledger Architecture for Secure Medical Record Exchange Across Heterogeneous Healthcare Networks

Names of Authors: Dr. Thomas Meier¹, Prof. Linus Osei²

Authors’ Affiliations: ¹Department of Medical Informatics, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany; ²Department of Computer Science, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana

Abstract: Abstract: Shifting patient health information across independent clinical institutions poses severe challenges regarding data interoperability, access control auditability, and absolute record privacy. Traditional centralized health databases remain high-value targets for malicious data breaches and experience single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities. This paper introduces a decentralized, distributed ledger architecture engineered specifically for secure electronic health record exchange. The system features a cryptographic permissioned blockchain backbone coupled with localized interstellar file system storage to isolate raw patient files from the core ledger index. Fine-grained user access rules are managed dynamically through immutable smart contracts deployed directly on the network. We deployed a pilot implementation of this architecture involving 15 simulated regional hospital nodes managing a combined pool of 50,000 synthetic patient profiles. The empirical performance evaluations show that the smart contract verification latency remains bounded beneath 85 ms under a peak transactional workload of 450 concurrent requests per second. The cryptographic consensus loop incurs zero data loss during simulated physical link failures of up to 30.0% of the active validation nodes. Furthermore, the overall file retrieval overhead was optimized by 34.2% compared to standard cryptographic web service alternatives, proving the framework's operational readiness for real-time healthcare information exchange networks.

Keywords: Distributed ledger, electronic health records, privacy preservation, blockchain, access control, smart contracts.

Manuscript Timeline: Received: March 12, 2010; Revised: April 18, 2010; Accepted: June 02, 2010; Published: June 15, 2010.

Citation: Meier, T., & Osei, L. (2010). A Distributed Ledger Architecture for Secure Medical Record Exchange Across Heterogeneous Healthcare Networks. International Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 12(6), 41–48.

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