Blockchain-Enabled Communication Framework for Secure and Scalable Healthcare Data Processing
Debashis Das, La Chiara Landrum, Pushpita Chatterjee, Uttam Ghosh, Sajid Hussain · 2025
The need for secure and efficient communication between connected devices continues to grow in healthcare systems within smart cities. Secure communication of healthcare data in Internet of Things (IoT) systems is critical to ensure patient privacy and data integrity. Problems with healthcare communication, like data breaches, integrity issues, scalability issues, and cyber threats, make it harder for people to trust doctors, cause costs to rise, stop people from using new technology, and put private data at risk. So, this paper presents a blockchain-based hybrid method for sending secure healthcare data that combines IoT systems with blockchain technology and high-tech encryption techniques like elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The proposed method uses the public key of a smart contract to encrypt private data to protect its privacy. It also uses cryptographic hashing and digital signatures to make sure that the data is correct and real. The framework stores metadata (e.g., hashes and signatures) on-chain, and large data uses off-chain storage like IPFS to reduce costs and improve scalability. It also incorporates a mechanism to authenticate IoT devices and enable secure communication across heterogeneous networks. Moreover, this work bridges gaps in existing solutions by providing an end-to-end secure communication system for healthcare applications. It provides strong data security and efficient storage for a reliable and scalable way to handle healthcare data safely in IoT ecosystems.