Health-ID: A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Identity Management for Remote Healthcare.

Ibrahim Tariq Javed,Fares Alharbi,Badr Bellaj,Tiziana Margaria,Noel Crespi,Kashif Naseer Qureshi

doi:10.3390/healthcare9060712

Abstract

COVID-19 has made eHealth an imperative. The pandemic has been a true catalyst for remote eHealth solutions such as teleHealth. Telehealth facilitates care, diagnoses, and treatment remotely, making them more efficient, accessible, and economical. However, they have a centralized identity management system that restricts the interoperability of patient and healthcare provider identification. Thus, creating silos of users that are unable to authenticate themselves beyond their eHealth application’s domain. Furthermore, the consumers of remote eHealth applications are forced to trust their service providers completely. They cannot check whether their eHealth service providers adhere to the regulations to ensure the security and privacy of their identity information. Therefore, we present a blockchain-based decentralized identity management system that allows patients and healthcare providers to identify and authenticate themselves transparently and securely across different eHealth domains. Patients and healthcare providers are uniquely identified by their health identifiers (healthIDs). The identity attributes are attested by a healthcare regulator, indexed on the blockchain, and stored by the identity owner. We implemented smart contracts on an Ethereum consortium blockchain to facilities identification and authentication procedures. We further analyze the performance using different metrics, including transaction gas cost, transaction per second, number of blocks lost, and block propagation time. Parameters including block-time, gas-limit, and sealers are adjusted to achieve the optimal performance of our consortium blockchain.

Highlights

Since SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) emerged, the demand for eHealth has gone viral
We propose a blockchain-based decentralized identity management for remote healthcare
The healthcare solutions presented in [21,22,23,24,25,32,33,34] only focus on decentralized healthcare record management systems. These solutions either assume to have a decentralized identity management (IdM) or rely on a centralized IdM of hospitals. None of these solutions provide a detailed implementation of an IdM system where patients and healthcare providers can authenticate and verify each other irrespective of their healthcare application

Summary

Introduction

Since SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) emerged, the demand for eHealth has gone viral. The novel coronavirus has swept across communities forcing a new normal that requires social distancing. Governments strongly suggest enforcing medical distancing to minimize physical contact between patients and healthcare providers. Telehealth applications facilitate clinical benefits for patients such as consultation, diagnoses, treatment, and prevention from a distance overcoming the geographical barrier. They can support non-clinical services for healthcare providers, such as training, meetings, and education [1]. EHealth applications provide real-time health monitoring using various devices and sensors [2]. In 2020, remote healthcare applications shifted from a previously slow adoption rate to a record pace of uptake. Whereas in 2021, the global eHealth market is expected to witness a 37.1% increase [3]. It is further predicted to rise to USD 310.09 billion by 2027, according to Data Bridge Market Research [4]

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