Blockchain-Enabled Secure Platforms for Management of Healthcare Data
Nimrita Koul, Sunilkumar S. Manvi · Apple Academic Press eBooks · 2022
Massive adoption of technologies like wearable IoT for personal health monitoring, smart health care systems, and digitalization of health records of patients by the hospitals, known as electronic health records (HERs), has led to the generation of huge volumes of sensitive data that is liable to be misused by parties with wrong intentions. These applications are good examples of cyber-physical systems which involve an integration of functionality of physical processes, computing, and networking with built-in feedback mechanisms. Although these systems have many advantages, there have been concerns regarding the security of personal patient data that these applications handle and communicate. There do exist solutions for the security of such data, but they often prove to be too restrictive, and are even patients do not have easy access to them, they are heavily non-reciprocal in the sense that interactive capabilities have not been part of the design for security purposes. The trade-off between data security and ease of access plus interactivity is in favor of too restrictiveness in order to preserve data integrity and avoid unauthorized modifications. Blockchain technology, by design, is suitable for this kind of trustless scenario where data integrity, non-repudiation, ease of access, transactional access to data, and high availability are essential. The volume of this private health data, which contains information about a person’s vital stats like name, medical history, address, clinical notes, laboratory, and imaging examination records, and screening reports, etc., is growing at an exponential rate. There are various parties involved 284 in the generation, management, disbursement of this data, therefore there arises a risk of breach of privacy or confidentiality, unauthorized access, or manipulation of this data by any of the involved parties. Blockchain maintains data in a decentralized, transactional, replicated, un-mutable storage units called blocks. Such a platform is a very viable option to manage HERs in a secure, privacy-preserving, trusted yet interactive manner.