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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Digit. Health

Sec. Health Informatics

Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2025.1685628

Decentralized Digital Health Ecosystems: A Unified Architecture for AI-Enhanced Medical Record Management

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Vellore Institute of Technology - Chennai Campus, Chennai, India
  • 2Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Chennai, India

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Abstract—Traditional Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems suffer from critical vulnerabilities in security, interoperability, and patient data control. This paper intro-duces PolyMed, a novel decentralized platform designed to address these challenges. PolyMed combines blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and edge computing into a synergistic architecture. It uses the Polygon blockchain for immutable record-keeping and a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) for transparent governance. Patient identity is secured through privacy-preserving zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and anchored to non-transferable Soulbound Tokens (SBTs), granting users true sovereignty over their data. The platform also includes a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) module to improve healthcare accessibility. Empirical evaluations on the Polygon Mainnet confirm the system's viability, showing sub-4-second transaction latencies and over 90% cost savings compared to legacy systems. The integrated AI model, leveraging a LightGBM classifier on a rich set of engineered features, achieves an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.8543 and an accuracy of 80.33% in emergency detection, demonstrating high reliability on a clinically relevant and imbalanced dataset. By aligning with global standards like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), PolyMed offers an integrated platform for patient-centric digital health management.

Keywords: Blockchain, Electronic Health Records (EHR), Artificial intelligence (AI), decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), Patient-centric healthcare, Polygon, interoperability

Received: 14 Aug 2025; Accepted: 30 Sep 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 N, C, A, Daniel and JOE I R. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: PRAVEEN JOE I R, praveenjoeir@yahoo.com

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.