Blockchain Bridges Critical National Infrastructures: E-Healthcare Data Migration Perspective

Abstract

Secure management of Critical National Infrastructures (CNI) is a burning challenge to any state. As a CNI, Electronic Healthcare System (EHS) infrastructure records citizens' medical records, raising security and privacy concerns. Traditional EHS functions independently where patients' records are recorded and maintained in centralized systems that produce massive redundant data. Due to the noncoherence of these systems, data atomicity is not maintained; hence research results based on these data create questioning. Moreover, medical records are valuable for research but cannot be public due to security and privacy. Blockchain (BC) is currently considered a potential solution for the challenges. Blockchain can integrate every independent EHS as a bridging platform. The solution can ensure data uniqueness and overcome security issues. The prime difficulties for the integration are data synchronization of the traditional EHS and BC-based EHS. Furthermore, the autonomous interoperability between SQL and NoSQL database used in typical EHS and BC-based EHS, respectively, is a prime challenge. Therefore, this research proposes a Blockchain-based framework that bridges Traditional E-Health Systems(TEHS) and allows uninterruptible data exchanges between two systems, even for archive medical records. Beyond that, the framework shows an elevated way to overcome a single point of failure, data security, access control, etc., issues in a centralized system. Finally, the testbed implementation justifies the proposed architecture.

Role of Blockchain Technology in Data Security for Healthcare

“…It is now safe to remove files that take up a lot of space or are often modified. There should be no record of a person's existence on the web [26]. Due to its decentralised nature, immutable databases, and robust data, blockchain-based healthcare database management solutions, such as patientbased encryption techniques, are gaining popularity.…”

“…Table 10 presents the results of a comparison of the Blocks that were affected by external attacks. In this investigation, traditional and proposed work processing times are compared and contrasted [25][26][27][28][29].…”

Blockchain for Healthcare Management Systems: A Survey on Interoperability and Security

“…In addition, due to the lack of consistency in these systems, the atomicity and integrity of the data are not maintained. Most medical records are valuable for research, but cannot be made public due to security and privacy requirements [85]. Moreover, standalone interoperability between SQL databases (e.g., Oracle or MySQL) and off-chain data using NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB or CouchDB), is an ongoing challenge [40].…”

“…The most complicated challenge is HMS interoperability and data exchange with various organizations, which is inescapable for e-government. Also, seamless synchronization and secure communication for interoperability between various healthcare institutions is an issue that needs to be addressed, as it is crucial to ensure the quality of healthcare services and modern research [85]. Standardization and international cooperation for the dissemination of standards are indispensable to improve the interoperability of e-health services [74].…”

“…An intermediary (server relay in Figure 11) can be applied to enable seamless interactions between separate components in the system while supporting both on-chain and off-chain storage. When applied to BC-based data storage and resolving the tension created by its public and immutable aspects, it is possible to use an intermediary, where simple patient metadata pointing to confidential data or big data, as the case may be, can be exposed on demand to gain access to the actual data [85]. This will also enable fully distributed applications [55] and facilitate the administration of access control policies [85].…”