Blockchain for healthcare data management: opportunities, challenges, and future recommendations

Yaqoob, Ibrar; Salah, Khaled; Jayaraman, Raja; Al-Hammadi, Yousof

doi:10.1007/s00521-020-05519-w

“…In academia, discussions on the application of blockchain technology to medical information systems have continued for several years, and most scholars have given positive answers and raised challenges [66], [67], [68], [69]. Asaph Azaria and his colleagues proposed MedRec [40] in 2016, a decentralized record management system using the blockchain technology.…”

Section: Comparison To Other Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security and Privacy for Healthcare Blockchains

Zhang

¹

,

Xue

²

,

Liu

³

2022

IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput.

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Healthcare blockchains provide an innovative way to store healthcare information, execute healthcare transactions, and build trust for healthcare data sharing and data integration in a decentralized open healthcare network environment. Although the healthcare blockchain technology has attracted broad interests and attention in industry, government and academia, the security and privacy concerns remain the focus of debate when deploying blockchains for information sharing in the healthcare sector from business operation to research collaboration. This paper focuses on the security and privacy requirements for medical data sharing using blockchain, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the security and privacy risks and requirements, accompanied by technical solution techniques and strategies. First, we discuss the security and privacy requirements and attributes required for electronic medical data sharing by deploying the healthcare blockchain. Second, we categorize existing efforts into three reference blockchain usage scenarios for electronic medical data sharing, and discuss the technologies for implementing these security and privacy properties in the three categories of usage scenarios for healthcare blockchain, such as anonymous signatures, attribute-based encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, verification techniques for smart contract security. Finally, we discuss other potential blockchain application scenarios in healthcare sector. We conjecture that this survey will help healthcare professionals, decision makers, and healthcare service developers to gain technical and intuitive insights into the security and privacy of healthcare blockchains in terms of concepts, risks, requirements, development and deployment technologies and systems.

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“…• We implement functional smart contracts of hospitalregulated healthcare systems, deploy the smart contracts, and perform extensive experiments and tests to analyze the functionality of our algorithms. The smart contract code along with testing scripts is publicly made available 1 .…”

Section: B Approach and Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2) Requesting EMR document: The doctor generates a request token and gets its keccak256 hash. The hash and the range of verifiers [1,4] are used in calling requestExternalEMR from HSC A . The network processes the request to validate the doctor parameters, resulting in constructing the desired range of verifiers [2,4] because the minimum number of acceptable verifiers by the network is 2.…”

Section: A Qualitative Functionality Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The adoption of blockchain in various fields can bring disintermediation, delay reductions, fraud and error reductions, and complete provenance of decisions and events. However, as diverse applications can have varying requirements, organizations and developers need to choose the optimal blockchain architecture, such as public, private, or consortium [1].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

appXchain: Application-Level Interoperability for Blockchain Networks

Madine

¹

,

Salah

²

,

Jayaraman

³

et al. 2021

Self Cite

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Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize industries by offering decentralized, transparent, data provenance, auditable, reliable, and trustworthy features. However, cross-chain interoperability is one of the crucial challenges preventing widespread adoption of blockchain applications. Cross-chain interoperability represents the ability for one blockchain network to interact and share data with another blockchain network. Contemporary cross-chain interoperability solutions are centralized and require re-engineering of the core blockchain stack to enable inter-communication and data sharing among heterogeneous blockchain networks. In this paper, we propose an application-based cross-chain interoperability solution named appXchain which allows blockchain networks of any architecture type and industrial focus to inter-communicate, share data, and make requests. Our solution utilizes the decentralized applications as a distributed translation layer that is capable of communicating and understanding multiple blockchain networks, thereby delegating requests and parameters among them. The architecture uses incentivized verifier nodes that maintain the integrity of shared data facilitating them to be readable by the entities of their network. We define and describe the roles and requirements of major entities of inter-operating blockchain networks in the context of healthcare. We present a detailed explanation of the sequence of interactions needed to share an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) document from one blockchain network to another along with the required algorithms. We implement the appXchain solution with Ethereum-based smart contracts for two hospitals and also present its cost and security analysis. We have made our smart contracts code and testing scripts publicly available.

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“…1) Requesting EMR document: The doctor generates a request token and gets its keccak256 hash. The hash and the range of verifiers [1,4] are used in calling requestExternalEMR from HSC A . The network processes the request to validate the doctor parameters, resulting in constructing the desired range of verifiers [2,4] because the minimum number of acceptable verifiers by the network is 2.…”

Section: A Qualitative Functionality Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

appXchain: Application-Level Interoperability for Blockchain Networks

Madine¹,

Salah²,

Jayaraman³

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize industries by offering decentralized, transparent, data provenance, auditable, reliable, and trustworthy features. However, cross-chain interoperability is one of the crucial challenges preventing widespread adoption of blockchain applications. Cross-chain interoperability represents the ability for one blockchain network to interact and share data with another blockchain network. Contemporary cross-chain interoperability solutions are centralized and require re-engineering of the core blockchain stack to enable inter-communication and data sharing among heterogeneous blockchain networks. In this paper, we propose an application-based cross-chain interoperability solution named appXchain which allows blockchain networks of any architecture type and industrial focus to inter-communicate, share data, and make requests. Our solution utilizes the decentralized applications as a distributed translation layer that is capable of communicating and understanding multiple blockchain networks, thereby delegating requests and parameters among them. The architecture uses incentivized verifier nodes that maintain the integrity of shared data facilitating them to be readable by the entities of their network. We define and describe the roles and requirements of major entities of inter-operating blockchain networks in the context of healthcare. We present a detailed explanation of the sequence of interactions needed to share an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) document from one blockchain network to another along with the required algorithms. We implement the appXchain solution with Ethereum-based smart contracts for two hospitals and also present its cost and security analysis. We have made our smart contracts code and testing scripts publicly available.

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Blockchain for healthcare data management: opportunities, challenges, and future recommendations

Cited by 230 publications

References 53 publications

Security and Privacy for Healthcare Blockchains

Security and Privacy for Healthcare Blockchains

appXchain: Application-Level Interoperability for Blockchain Networks

appXchain: Application-Level Interoperability for Blockchain Networks

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