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

Abstract

Healthcare data is crucial and sensitive because it contains information about a patient's medical history, treatments along with actions. This information is frequently shared among different stakeholders of the system. As patients' information is vital, therefore, it must be kept accurate, up to date, secret, and available only to those who are authorized to access the specified information. Centralized systems are commonly used to maintain healthcare records which increases the security risk. Therefore, this study focuses on protecting the privacy and security of sensitive healthcare documents while sharing them across multiple healthcare participants. In this work, we proposed a privacy-preserving access control framework based on blockchain technology that uses consensusdriven decentralized data management on top of peerto-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 irreversibility and immutability features. Furthermore, we comprehensively investigate the blockchain-enabled security requirements by including patients, doctors, chemists, and pathology labs as entities of the system that can share information through a proper channel. We have evaluated our proposed framework using Hyperledger Fabric and found