Blockchain Bridges Critical National Infrastructures: E-Healthcare Data Migration Perspective

Abstract

Secure management of Critical National Infrastructures (CNI) is a burning challenge to any state. As a CNI, Electronic Healthcare System (EHS) infrastructure records citizens&#x2019; medical records, raising security and privacy concerns. Traditional EHS functions independently where patients&#x2019; records are recorded and maintained in centralized systems that produce massive redundant data. Due to the non-coherence of these systems, data atomicity is not maintained; hence research results based on these data create questioning. Moreover, medical records are valuable for research but cannot be public due to security and privacy. Blockchain (BC) is currently considered a potential solution for the challenges. Blockchain can integrate every independent EHS as a bridging platform. The solution can ensure data uniqueness and overcome security issues. The prime difficulties for the integration are data synchronization of the traditional EHS and BC-based EHS. Furthermore, the autonomous interoperability between <i>SQL</i> and <i>NoSQL</i> database used in typical EHS and BC-based EHS, respectively, is a prime challenge. Therefore, this research proposes a Blockchain-based framework that bridges Traditional E-Health Systems(TEHS) and allows uninterruptible data exchanges between two systems, even for archive medical records. Beyond that, the framework shows an elevated way to overcome a single point of failure, data security, access control, etc., issues in a centralized system. Finally, the testbed implementation justifies the proposed architecture.