MedTourChain: a blockchain-powered secure communication framework for telemedicine in medical tourism

Medical tourism allows patients to access advanced healthcare treatments in foreign countries at a lower cost than in their home country. Telemedicine, widely used to support pre- and post-operative consultations between medical experts in patients’ home and foreign countries, relies on high-speed telecommunication links that enable the seamless, real-time sharing of video, images, and text data. Although telemedicine offers many features that can significantly enhance the medical tourism experience, existing telemedicine technologies heavily rely on centralized infrastructures. This reliance introduces challenges such as data security and privacy when leveraging these centralized systems for telemedicine in medical tourism. Moreover, there is a lack of transparency and accountability in centralized solutions when handling patient data stored in Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Due to the highly sensitive nature of the data and credentials stored in EHRs, there is an increased risk of fraudulent financial activities and transactions in centralized telemedicine systems. Therefore, it is imperative to develop novel solutions that are more secure, transparent, and reliable to address these challenges and promote the sustainable adoption of telemedicine in medical tourism. In this work, we present MedTourChain, a blockchain-based telemedicine system for medical tourism, designed to streamline the process of securely and transparently storing and accessing EHRs. The system comprises several smart contracts to ensure that all operations performed by various stakeholders are recorded on an immutable blockchain ledger, enhancing security, privacy, and traceability. To support the storage of large files, such as images and reports by consultants, the system leverages the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for scalability. The proposed system is implemented using a Remix IDE-based Ethereum blockchain platform. It is observed that, on average, 0.0005746 Ether is consumed when a smart contract function related to the use cases considered in this research is executed.