PRMS: Design and Development of Patients’ E-Healthcare Records Management System for Privacy Preservation in Third Party Cloud Platforms

Abstract

In the current digital era, personal data storage on public platforms is a major cause of concern with severe security and privacy ramifications. This is true especially in e-health data management since patient’s health data must be managed following a slew of established standards. The Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) primarily provide computing and storage resources. However, data security in the cloud is still a major concern. In several instances, Blockchain technology rescues the CSPs by providing the robust security to the underlying data by encrypting data using the unique and secret keys. Each network user in Blockchain has its own unique and secret keys linked directly to the transaction keys as a digital signature to protect the data. However, Blockchain technology suffers from the latency and throughput issues in high workload scenarios. To overcome e-healthcare records privacy issues in a third-party cloud, we designed a Patient’s E-Healthcare Records Management System (PRMS) that focuses on latency and throughput. A comprehensive performance analysis of PRMS is carried out on different third-party clouds to validate its applicability. Moreover, the proposed PRMS system is compared with Blockchain platforms such as Hyperledger Fabric v0.6 and Etherium 1.5.8 against latency and throughput by adjusting the workload for each platform up to 10,000 transactions per second. The proposed PRMS is compared to the Secure and Robust Healthcare-Based Blockchain (SRHB) approach using Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) and small bank datasets. The experimental results indicate that deploying PRMS on AmazonWeb Services decreases System Execution Time (SET) and the Average Delay (AD) time by 2.4%, 8.33%, and 25.15%, 15.26%, respectively. Additionally, deploying PRMS on the Google Cloud Platform decreases System Execution Time (SET) and Average Delay (AD) by 2.27%, 2.4%, and 2.72%, 4.73% AD, respectively. The experimental results confirm the superiority of the PRMS under the high workload scenario over SRHB and its applicability in cloud data centers.