Secure Data Transmission of Electronic Health Records Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Electronic Health Records (EHR) serve as a solid documentation of health transactions and as a vital resource of information for healthcare stakeholders. EHR integrity and security issues, however, continue to be intractable. Blockchain-based EHR architectures, however, address the issues of integrity very effectively. In this work, we suggest a decentralized patient-centered healthcare data management (PCHDM) with a blockchain-based EHR framework to address issues of confidentiality, access control, and privacy of record. This patient-centric architecture keeps the patient at the center of control for secured storage of EHR data. It is effective in the storage environment with the interplanetary file system (IPFS) and blockchain technology. In order to control unauthorized users, the proposed secure password authentication-based key exchange (SPAKE) implements smart contract-based access control to EHR transactions and access policies. The experimental setup comprises four hyperledger fabric nodes with level DB database and IPFS off-chain storage. The framework was evaluated using the public hepatitis dataset, with parameters such as block creation time, transactional computational overhead with encryption key size, and uploading/downloading time with EHR size. The framework enables patient-centric access control of the EHR with the SPAKE encryption algorithm.