Blockchain‐based patient centric health care communication system

Abstract

SummaryThe rapid increase in health care data breaches with the existing centralized systems emphasizes a decentralized health care system while ensuring reliability, privacy, security, and trust. Further, to ensure trust in the medical community, scientist, and pharmaceutical, it is essential to improve the quality of health care data management. In this direction, we proposed a blockchain‐based decentralized privacy‐preserving EMR management (DPEM), which can ensure accountability and integrity. We propose a four‐layered framework for DPEM consisting of a data preparation layer, access control and security layer, data sharing layer, and data storage layer with the objectives: (i) To provide privacy‐preserving in DPEM, we propose a new elliptic curve‐based content extraction signature (EC‐CES) through which patients can exclude EMR's sensitive information to eradicate leakage of privacy information in the data sharing process. (ii) To provide secure data sharing, blockchain smart contracts are used to define the predefined access permissions of the patients. (iii) To provide secure storage, we use a cloud facility to store actual EMRs, and consortium blockchain is used to store respective indexes of EMRs so that the data leakages of EMRs could be optimized and simultaneously, indexes in consortium blockchain will take care the integrity of EMRs. (iv) To provide access control in data sharing, we adopted ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based encryption (CP‐ABE) access control policy to empower the owners of data to secure the cloud storage and give access to authorized users through the encrypted link to the cloud storage with access control policies blinded. Finally, the security analysis demonstrates that DPEM is an optimized way of achieving EMRs secure data sharing.