A blockchain-based privacy-preserving and access-control framework for electronic health records management

Abstract

Healthcare data is crucial and sensitive, as it contains absolute information about a patient’s medical history, treatments, and actions; this information gets shared among the stakeholders on a routine basis. Patients’ information is vital and should be kept accurate, up-to-date, and secret; it should be available only to authorized users. Most of the existing systems are centralized and may breach data privacy. This study mainly focuses on protecting the privacy and security of sensitive healthcare data while sharing with multiple stakeholders. This work presents a privacy-preserving and access-control blockchain-based framework that uses consensus-driven decentralized data management on top of peer-to-peer distributed computing platforms to ensure the privacy, security, accessibility, and integrity of healthcare data. Blockchain technology helps to protect transactions from manipulation due to its features of irreversibility and immutability. Additionally, we thoroughly examine the security requirements afforded by blockchain-enabled systems by incorporating stakeholders like patients, doctors, chemists, and pathology labs as system entities; they can only share information through a proper channel. The proposed framework has been implemented and evaluated using Hyperledger Fabric. We observe that the proposed framework reveals promising benefits in security, regulation compliance, reliability, flexibility, and accuracy.