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MediBlocks: secure exchanging of electronic health records (EHRs) using trust-based blockchain network with privacy concerns

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Abstract

Healthcare is a sensitive domain, and it is necessary to design an efficient solution in the healthcare system. Electronic Medical Records often have high privacy-sensitive data; unauthorized access to these patient data could hurt patients' reputations and cause financial losses to the organization. Most of the existing healthcare systems are based on a centralized architecture, which is more vulnerable such as hacking the healthcare system, arbitrary modification attacks, and single-point-of-failure. Also, these systems increase the cost due to various factors like—establishing a trusted network, cost per transaction, and limited access to patient health data, which are the problems that remain open until now. The blockchain is a general-purpose technology that seems to be an innovative and interesting technology that can improve the Health care domain by solving the above issues with a secure architecture. This paper address addresses the challenging problems. (1) How to provide secure data exchange and anonymity. (2) How to preserve the personal data privacy of the patient health records. The proposed solution leverages the Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain that establishes a secured and trusted network to all stakeholders, ensuring the integrity of protected health information and providing authenticity and health access control. Further, the entire supply chain can be traced, decreasing duplicate tests and unnecessary service, increasing accountability, preserving the crucial documents, limiting the unauthorized sharing of the EHRs documents, and offering lower costs across the care continuum.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on the reasonable request from the first author (E Suresh Babu).

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Funding

Waleed Al-Numay acknowledges financial support from the Researchers Supporting Project number (RSP-2021/250), King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, NIT Warangal, Hanamkonda, Telangana, India

    Erukala Suresh Babu

  2. Department of CSE, JNTUH Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    B. V. Ram Naresh Yadav

  3. Department of CSE, VNR Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering and Technology Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    A. Kousar Nikhath

  4. Amity School of Engineering and Technology, Amity University Uttar Pradesh, Noida, India

    Soumya Ranjan Nayak

  5. Riyadh Community College, CS Department, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Waleed Alnumay

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  1. Erukala Suresh Babu
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  2. B. V. Ram Naresh Yadav
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  3. A. Kousar Nikhath
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  4. Soumya Ranjan Nayak
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All authors have equally contributed to this work, read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Soumya Ranjan Nayak.

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The authors declare that this manuscript has no conflict of interest with any other published source and has not been published previously (partly or in full). No data have been fabricated or manipulated to support our conclusions.

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Babu, E.S., Yadav, B.V.R.N., Nikhath, A.K. et al. MediBlocks: secure exchanging of electronic health records (EHRs) using trust-based blockchain network with privacy concerns. Cluster Comput 26, 2217–2244 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-022-03652-w

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