HealthBlock: A Blockchain-IoT Fusion for Secure Healthcare Data Exchange

Abstract

Managing healthcare data while ensuring its security and privacy is critical to providing quality care to patients. However, traditional approaches to healthcare data sharing have limitations, including the risk of data breaches and the lack of privacy-preserving mechanisms. This research paper proposes a novel hybrid blockchain-IoT approach for privacy-preserving healthcare data sharing that addresses these challenges. Our system incorporates a private blockchain for protected and tamper-proof data sharing, with privacy-preserving techniques such as differential privacy and homomorphic encryption to protect patient data. IoT devices are utilized to collect and transmit real-time data, equipped with privacy-preserving mechanisms such as data anonymization and secure transmission protocols. Our approach achieved an accuracy rate of 98% for access control and a 99.6% success rate for data privacy protection. Furthermore, our proposed system demonstrated improved data storage and retrieval performance, with a data storage overhead reduction of up to 86% and a data retrieval time reduction of up to 81%. These results indicate the potential of our approach to enhance the security, privacy, and efficiency of healthcare data management, contributing to improved patient care outcomes.