Abstract
Electronic healthcare (eHealth) identity management (IdM) is a pivotal feature in the eHealth system. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is an emerging technology that can achieve agreements of transactional data states in a decentralized way. Building identity management systems using Blockchain can enable patients to fully control their own identity and provide increased confidence in data immutability and availability. This paper presents the state of the art of decentralized identity management using Blockchain and highlights the possible opportunities for adopting the decentralized identity management approaches for future health identity systems. First, we summarize eHealth identity management scenarios. Furthermore, we investigate the existing decentralized identity management solutions and present decentralized identity models. In addition, we discuss the current decentralized identity projects and identify new challenges based on the existing solutions and the limitations when applying it to healthcare as a particular use case.
Highlights
Electronic health refers to the use of information and communication technologies to improve the quality of healthcare
The healthcare system is extremely mobile in nature and working in such systems requires a high mobility of physicians and caregivers as well as collaboration among different decision-makers and stockholders including care professionals and patients [2]. eHealth identity management is much more than just authorizing or revoking access to certain entities; it is the process of protecting sensitive data including authentications of users, managing the medical records, and guarantees the security and privacy of entities according to the local legislation and laws [3]
Autonomy or self-government is only addressed in the decentralized model as the users in centralized models are always tied to the service providers; while authority or self-control was the main objective of user-centric identity model but still, the user is chained to vendors, the self-control is fully addressed in the decentralized model
Summary
Electronic health (eHealth) refers to the use of information and communication technologies to improve the quality of healthcare. DLT identity management is a promising approach to solve the existing digital identity limitation, with the potential of ensuring integrity while sharing information between different healthcare stockholders and grant access to their network without compromising data. Together with, highlighting the limitation of centralized identity models and presenting the opportunities of using DLT for eHealth decentralized identity management. We present all the existing solutions that support DLT, self-sovereign identity, and decentralized identity models by discussing the potential of implementing such solutions for eHealth, and we deliberate the benchmarks of evaluating blockchain-based identity management solutions.
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