Chapter 11 - A novel privacy-preserving healthcare information sharing platform using blockchain

Abstract

Secure sharing of medical data is essential for both patients and providers of various interests. Patients’ main concern is to securely and confidentially have their information stored and shares their sensitive medical records among different providers. Due to the inability of querying hospital’s or doctor’s private databases, the need for an immutable and decentralized database emerges. Blockchain is considered to provide an important role in improving interoperability in health data systems due to its characteristics of sharing and distribution. Many blockchain-based models for sharing medical data are proposed in the literature. However, many of these models do not prioritize the patient’s concerns or interests. In this paper, we propose a patient-driven medical data sharing system using blockchain technology. We show how our model provides both the properties for a patient-driven system and the main security features for secure sharing of healthcare information.