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Secure Electronic Health Record Storage and Retrieval Using Blockchain and Encryption for Healthcare Application

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Abstract

With the rapid advancement of digital technologies, the electronic health record is not a concept but a reality. Electronic health records (EHR) are the patients’ health information that are stored for further reference. These recorded data in the form of electronic media are known as electronic health records and contain sensitive information about the patients. To ensure security and privacy, sensitive health records must be stored and shared through a secure communication channel ensuring confidentiality, authenticity and integrity. Blockchain provides the trust between healthcare service providers and patients i.e. healthcare service receivers. Blockchain also offers decentralization operation and transparency, which makes any application built using it more secure and also protects unauthorized access. This paper presents a blockchain-based model to solve the issue and challenges of securing the health records in an efficient and secure manner. Several popular encryption algorithms such as AES, DES, RSA, Rabbit and RC4 have been considered and implemented in this work. We have experimentally analyzed the latency to securely store and retrieve EHRs using blockchain. Experimental results show that the blockchain model with the AES-256 algorithm has the least average end-to-end delay of 635.25 ms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Applications, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

    Sohail Saif

  2. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

    Nabin Mondal & Suparna Biswas

Authors
  1. Sohail Saif
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  2. Nabin Mondal
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  3. Suparna Biswas
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Correspondence to Suparna Biswas.

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This article is part of the topical collection “Social Data Science: Research Challenges and Future Directions” guest edited by Sarbani Roy, Chandreyee Chowdhury and Samiran Chattopadhyay.

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Saif, S., Mondal, N. & Biswas, S. Secure Electronic Health Record Storage and Retrieval Using Blockchain and Encryption for Healthcare Application. SN COMPUT. SCI. 4, 300 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-023-01723-2

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