Academic literature on the topic 'Healthchain'

The privacy of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is facing a major hurdle with outsourcing private health data in the cloud as there exists danger of leaking health information to unauthorized parties. In fact, EHRs are stored on centralized databases that increases the security risk footprint and requires trust in a single authority which cannot effectively protect data from internal attacks. This research focuses on ensuring the patient privacy and data security while sharing the sensitive data across same or different organisations as well as healthcare providers in a distributed environment. This research develops a privacy-preserving framework viz Healthchain based on Blockchain technology that maintains security, privacy, scalability and integrity of the e-health data. The Blockchain is built on Hyperledger fabric, a permissioned distributed ledger solutions by using Hyperledger composer and stores EHRs by utilizing InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to build this healthchain framework. Moreover, the data stored in the IPFS is encrypted by using a unique cryptographic public key encryption algorithm to create a robust blockchain solution for electronic health data. The objective of the research is to provide a foundation for developing security solutions against cyber-attacks by exploiting the inherent features of the blockchain, and thus contribute to the robustness of healthcare information sharing environments. Through the results, the proposed model shows that the healthcare records are not traceable to unauthorized access as the model stores only the encrypted hash of the records that proves effectiveness in terms of data security, enhanced data privacy, improved data scalability, interoperability and data integrity while sharing and accessing medical records among stakeholders across the healthchain network.

Blockchain-based electronic health system growth is hindered by privacy, confidentiality, and security. By protecting against them, this research aims to develop cybersecurity measurement approaches to ensure the security and privacy of patient information using blockchain technology in healthcare. Blockchains need huge resources to store big data. This paper presents an innovative solution, namely patient-centric healthcare data management (PCHDM). It comprises the following: (i) in an on-chain health record database, hashes of health records are stored as health record chains in Hyperledger fabric, and (ii) off-chain solutions that encrypt actual health data and store it securely over the interplanetary file system (IPFS) which is the decentralized cloud storage system that ensures scalability, confidentiality, and resolves the problem of blockchain data storage. A security smart contract hosted through container technology with Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus ensures patient privacy by verifying patient preferences before sharing health records. The Distributed Ledger technology performance is tested under hyper ledger caliper benchmarks in terms of transaction latency, resource utilization, and transaction per second. The model provides stakeholders with increased confidence in collaborating and sharing their health records.

Recently, with the great development of e-health, more and more countries have made certain achievements in the field of electronic medical treatment. The digitization of medical equipment and the structuralization of electronic medical records are the general trends. While bringing convenience to people, the explosive growth of medical data will further promote the value of mining medical data. Obviously, finding out how to safely store such a large amount of data is a problem that urgently needs to be solved. Additionally, the particularity of medical data makes it necessarily subject to great privacy protection needs. This reinforces the importance of designing a safe solution to ensure data privacy. Many existing schemes are based on single-server architecture, which have some natural defects (such as single-point faults). Although blockchain can help solve such problems, there are still some deficiencies in privacy protection. To solve these problems, this paper designs a medical data privacy protection system, which integrates blockchain, group signature, and asymmetric encryption to realize reliable medical data sharing between medical institutions and protect the data privacy of patients. This paper proves theoretically that it meets our security and privacy requirements, and proves its practicability through system implementation.

Background Blockchain has the potential to disrupt the current modes of patient data access, accumulation, contribution, exchange, and control. Using interoperability standards, smart contracts, and cryptographic identities, patients can securely exchange data with providers and regulate access. The resulting comprehensive, longitudinal medical records can significantly improve the cost and quality of patient care for individuals and populations alike. Objective This work presents HealthChain, a novel patient-centered blockchain framework. The intent is to bolster patient engagement, data curation, and regulated dissemination of accumulated information in a secure, interoperable environment. A mixed-block blockchain is proposed to support immutable logging and redactable patient blocks. Patient data are generated and exchanged through Health Level-7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, allowing seamless transfer with compliant systems. In addition, patients receive cryptographic identities in the form of public and private key pairs. Public keys are stored in the blockchain and are suitable for securing and verifying transactions. Furthermore, the envisaged system uses proxy re-encryption (PRE) to share information through revocable, smart contracts, ensuring the preservation of privacy and confidentiality. Finally, several PRE improvements are offered to enhance performance and security. Methods The framework was formulated to address key barriers to blockchain adoption in health care, namely, information security, interoperability, data integrity, identity validation, and scalability. It supports 16 configurations through the manipulation of 4 modes. An open-source, proof-of-concept tool was developed to evaluate the performance of the novel patient block components and system configurations. To demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework and evaluate resource consumption, extensive testing was performed on each of the 16 configurations over a variety of scenarios involving a variable number of existing and imported records. Results The results indicate several clear high-performing, low-bandwidth configurations, although they are not the strongest cryptographically. Of the strongest models, one’s anticipated cumulative record size is shown to influence the selection. Although the most efficient algorithm is ultimately user specific, Advanced Encryption Standard–encrypted data with static keys, incremental server storage, and no additional server-side encryption are the fastest and least bandwidth intensive, whereas proxy re-encrypted data with dynamic keys, incremental server storage, and additional server-side encryption are the best performing of the strongest configurations. Conclusions Blockchain is a potent and viable technology for patient-centered access to and exchange of health information. By integrating a structured, interoperable design with patient-accumulated and generated data shared through smart contracts into a universally accessible blockchain, HealthChain presents patients and providers with access to consistent and comprehensive medical records. Challenges addressed include data security, interoperability, block storage, and patient-administered data access, with several configurations emerging for further consideration regarding speed and security.

The right to privacy is the most fundamental right of a citizen in any country. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in healthcare has faced problems with privacy breaches, insider outsider attacks and unauthenticated record access in recent years, the most serious being related to the privacy and security of medical data. Ensuring privacy and security while handling patient data is of the utmost importance as a patient’s information should only be released to others with the patient’s permission or if it is allowed by law. Electronic health data (EHD) is an emerging health information exchange model that enables healthcare providers and patients to efficiently store and share their private healthcare information from any place and at any time as required. Generally, cloud services provide the infrastructure by reducing the cost of storing, processing and updating information with improved efficiency and quality. However, the privacy of EHRs is a significant hurdle when outsourcing private health data in the cloud because there is a higher risk of health information being leaked to unauthorized parties. Several existing techniques can analyse the security and privacy issues associated with e-healthcare services. These methods are designed for single databases, or databases with an authentication centre and thus cannot adequately protect the data from insider attacks. In fact, storing EHRs on centralized databases increases the security risk footprint and requires trust in a single authority. Therefore, this research study mainly focuses on how to ensure patient privacy and security while sharing sensitive data between the same or different organisations as well as healthcare providers in a distributed environment. This research successfully proposes and implements a permissioned blockchain framework named Healthchain, which maintains the security, privacy, scalability and integrity of the e-health data. The blockchain is built on Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned distributed ledger solution by employing Hyperledger Composer and stores EHRs by utilizing InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to build the decentralized web applications. Healthchain builds a two-pronged solution (i) an on-chain solution implemented on the secure network of Hyperledger Fabric which utilizes the state database Couch DB, (ii) an off-chain solution to securely store encrypted data via IPFS. The Healthchain architecture employs Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) as the distributed network consensus processes to determine which block is to be added to the blockchain. Healthchain Hyperledger Fabric leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprises the application logic of this system. This research aimed at contributing towards the scalability in blockchain by storing the data hashes of health records on chain and the actual data is stored cryptographically off chain in IPFS, the decentralized storage. Moreover, the data stored in the IPFS will be encrypted by using special public key cryptographic algorithms to create robust blockchain solutions for EHD. This research study develops a privacy preserving framework with three main core contributions to the e-Health ecosystem: (i) it contributes a privacy preserving patient-centric framework namely Healthchain; (ii) introduces an efficient referral mechanism for the effective sharing of healthcare records; and (iii) prevents prescription drug abuse by performing drug tracking transactions employing smart contract functionality to create a smart health care ecosystem. The results demonstrates that the developed prototype ensures that healthcare records are not traceable to illegal disclosure as the model only stores the encrypted hash of records and is proven to be effective in terms of enhanced data privacy, data security, improved data scalability, interoperability and data integrity when accessing and sharing medical records among stakeholders across the Healthchain network. This research develops a foolproof security solution against cyber-attacks by exploiting the inherent features of the blockchain, thereby contributing to the robustness of healthcare information sharing systems and also unravels the potential for blockchain in health IT solutions.

The research shows that the blockchain has a wide range of healthcare applications including electronic medical records, drug and pharmaceutical supply chain management, biomedical research and education, remote patient monitoring, health data analysis, among others. A number of blockchain-based healthcare applications have been developed as examples based on emerging blockchain paradigms, such as smart contracts, etc. In this research, a health chain system is introduced. HealthChain is an online portal that maintains a digital copy of a patient's medical history, along with all his/her diagnoses, prescriptions, and medical receipts.