Proof-of-Familiarity: A Privacy-Preserved Blockchain Scheme for Collaborative Medical Decision-Making

Abstract

The current healthcare sector is facing difficulty in satisfying the growing issues, expenses, and heavy regulation of quality treatment. Surely, electronic medical records (EMRs) and protected health information (PHI) are highly sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII). However, the sharing of EMRs, enhances overall treatment quality. A distributed ledger (blockchain) technology, embedded with privacy and security by architecture, provides a transparent application developing platform. Privacy, security, and lack of confidence among stakeholders are the main downsides of extensive medical collaboration. This study, therefore, utilizes the transparency, security, and efficiency of blockchain technology to establish a collaborative medical decision-making scheme. This study considers the experience, skill, and collaborative success rate of four key stakeholders (patient, cured patient, doctor, and insurance company) in the healthcare domain to propose a local reference-based consortium blockchain scheme, and an associated consensus gathering algorithm, proof-of-familiarity (PoF). Stakeholders create a transparent and tenable medical decision to increase the interoperability among collaborators through PoF. A prototype of PoF is tested with multichain 2.0, a blockchain implementing framework. Moreover, the privacy of identities, EMRs, and decisions are preserved by two-layer storage, encryption, and a timestamp storing mechanism. Finally, superiority over existing schemes is identified to improve personal data (PII) privacy and patient-centric outcomes research (PCOR).

A Blockchain Platform for User Data Sharing Ensuring User Control and Incentives

“…Users can optionally store any published data in off-chain that saves storage place and bandwidth. The similar idea of storing off-chain data and accessing them via MultiChain has also been proposed in our previous research works (Shrestha et al, 2017;Shrestha and Vassileva, 2018) and others' works such as Yang et al (2019) and Ferrer-Sapena and Sánchez-Pérez (2019). MultiChain nodes handle key operations such as hashing and encrypting the user data, storing the encrypted file locally (outside of blockchain), committing the hash of the file on the blockchain, searching the required data, verifying the data and delivering the data.…”

The Current State of Research, Challenges, and Future Research Directions of Blockchain Technology in Patient Care: Systematic Review

“…Most of the research reviewed focused on blockchain’s use to strengthen HIT security or patients’ privacy during health data exchange or access; 53% (37/70) papers focused on addressing patients’ lack of control over the privacy and security of their data [ 10 - 46 ], and 40% (28/70) papers addressed blockchain’s ability to prevent data tampering [ 10 , 12 , 21 , 25 , 33 , 34 , 37 , 38 , 40 - 44 , 46 - 60 ]. Data breaches were addressed in 37% (26/70) papers [ 15 , 18 , 19 , 22 , 24 , 29 , 31 , 32 , 34 , 36 - 38 , 43 , 44 , 54 , 56 - 66 ], 9% (6/70) papers mentioned malicious attacks (eg, impersonation) that blockchain could potentially resolve [ 17 , 34 , 44 , 56 , 60 , 67 ], and 4% (3/70) papers focused on how blockchain can preserve patients’ anonymity while third parties accessed their health and medical records for activities such as medical research [ 41 , 42 , 68 ].…”

A Systematic Review of Blockchain in Healthcare: Frameworks, Prototypes, and Implementations

“…Most papers analysed did not discuss development strategy, yet a few mentioned their system as either open source or having an Open API or proprietary, and again most did not discuss this as shown in Figure 17. Only the following papers reviewed papers discussed one or more of the following consensus algorithms: Proof-of-Work [27], [31], [38], [40], [41], [44]- [46], [50], [70], [75], [77], [80], [84], [87], [92], [96], [98], [106], [108], [118], [122], [127], Proof-of-Stake [114], [115], [124], [125], Proof-of-Existence [28], Proof-of-Information [62], Delegated-Proof-of-Stake [34], [121], [166], Hybrid-Delegated-Proof-of-Stake [85], [90], Delegated-Proof-of-Work [103], Proof-of-Disease [59], Proof-of-Authority [143], and Proof-of-Familiarity [158].…”