Blockchain for security and privacy in healthcare informatics

Abstract

The attention and interest of governments and related industry areas in the digitization of healthcare systems have been increased significantly in the recent past and the same is being evidenced by numerous initiatives taken by many countries and sectors. Healthcare informatics is a decisive component of a healthcare system that has demonstrated a growing specialization linking healthcare systems, communication systems, and information technology for improving the quality, storage, and safety of patient related information. Healthcare informatics facilitates organizations and service providers to discriminate between huge amount of big-data and the real meaningful data so as to integrate the meaningful data flawlessly into a health system.Healthcare systems must protect the privacy and security of patient data, at the same time carrying quality patient care and following the essential regulatory requirements. With the evolution of technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything (IoE) and besides their advantages in today's highly pervasive computing era, there has been a significant demand of secure storage of a huge amount of patient data. New kinds of vulnerabilities and security attacks are threatening the IoT and IoE-based healthcare systems due to many reasons including the usage of various kinds of medical devices, nature of wireless communication, ignorance of security by manufacturers of medical devices, and many others. Electronic healthcare record systems must ensure the CIA requirements of security, i.e., confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information stored. Moreover, this data must be communicated securely among all the authorized entities like medical practitioners, along with the privileges for accessing particular patient's specific data to expedite diagnosis and treatment.Blockchain technology has evolved rapidly in past few years, and is making most of the centralized systems obsolete owing to its unique properties of immutability, decentralized, transparency, and reduction in cost. Blockchain is going to revolutionize the area of healthcare informatics since it can facilitate the majority of functionalities required for healthcare information system like privacy of stored data, secure sharing of data, data audit, integrity checks, and identity management. In addition to integrity, confidentiality, and availability, blockchain-based security solutions can provide auditability, accountability, authenticity, and anonymity.This chapter aims at exploring the different aspects of developing blockchain-based security solutions for healthcare informatics. The chapter identifies the security requirements and challenges in healthcare system. It also describes the security aspects in centralized/decentralized healthcare systems and also elaborates adaptions and impact of Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Systems. Security attributes and architecture of blockchain and its applicability in developing secure frameworks for healthcare informatics have also been explained here. How the issues of identity and trust management can be addressed in healthcare using blockchain, has also been presented in this chapter. The security of big data in healthcare using blockchain, along with the technologies like IoT and IoE have also been addressed in this chapter. Finally, the chapter speaks about the challenges, opportunities, and future insights of blockchain-based healthcare systems.