Acta Informatica Pragensia 2022, 11(1), 105-122 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1763995
Privacy Preservation and Access Control for Sharing Electronic Health Records Using Blockchain Technology
- LIRE Laboratory, Software and Information Systems Technologies Department, Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Constantine 2 University – Abdelhamid Mehri, Nouvelle ville Ali Mendjli BP67A, Constantine, Algeria
Sharing of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is of significant importance in health care. Lately, a cloud-based electronic health record sharing scheme has been used extensively to share patient records among various healthcare organizations. However, cloud centralization may compromise patients’ privacy and security. Due to the special features of blockchain, it is important to see this technology as a promising solution to resolve these issues. This article proposes a privacy-preserving, secure EHR sharing and access control framework based on blockchain technology. The proposal aims to implement EHR blockchain technology and ensure that electronic records are stored safely by specifying user access permissions. We emulate the cryptographic primitives and use smart contracts to describe the relationships between the EHR owner and EHR user through the proposed system on the Ethereum blockchain. We assess the proposal results based on encryption and decryption time and the costs of the smart contract. The encryption and decryption times are proportional to the size of the EHR, which varies from 128 KB to 128 MB. When it comes to encryption, the smallest EHR takes 0.0012 s to encrypt, while the largest EHR, which is 128 MB, takes 1.4149 s. On the other hand, a 128 KB EHR takes 0.0013 s to decrypt, whereas a 128 MB EHR requires 1.6284 s. As a result, performance evaluation and security analysis confirm that the proposal is secure for practical application.
Keywords: Blockchain; Encryption; Electronic health record; Privacy.
Received: December 3, 2021; Revised: February 6, 2022; Accepted: February 17, 2022; Prepublished online: February 17, 2022; Published: March 13, 2022 Show citation
References
- AbuKhousa, E., Mohamed, N., & Al-Jaroodi, J. (2012). e-Health Cloud: Opportunities and Challenges. Future internet, 4(3), 621-645. https://doi.org/10.3390/fi4030621
Go to original source...
- Abunadi, I., & Kumar, R. L. (2021). BSF-EHR: blockchain security framework for electronic health records of patients. Sensors, 21(8), Article no. 2865. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21082865
Go to original source...
- Agbo, C., Mahmoud, Q., & Eklund, J. (2019). Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Systematic Review. Healthcare, 7(2), 56. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare7020056
Go to original source...
- Boumezbeur, I., & Zarour, K. (2018). Privacy Preserving Requirements for Sharing Health Data in Cloud. In International Conference Europe Middle East & North Africa Information Systems and Technologies to Support Learning (pp. 412-423). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03577-8_46
Go to original source...
- Capitalone. (2022). Capital main page. https://www.capitalone.com/
- Catalini, C., & Gans, J. S. (2020). Some simple economics of the blockchain. Communications of the ACM, 63(7), 80-90. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359552
Go to original source...
- Chen, L., Lee, W.K., Chang, C.C., Choo, K.K. R., & Zhang, N. (2019). Blockchain based searchable encryption for electronic health record sharing. Future generation computer systems, 95, 420-429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.01.018
Go to original source...
- Cheng, E. C., Le, Y., Zhou, J., & Lu, Y. (2018). Healthcare services across China-on implementing an extensible universally unique patient identifier system. International Journal of Healthcare Management, 11(3), 210-216. https://doi.org/10.1080/20479700.2017.1398388
Go to original source...
- FACTOM. (2022). FACTOM main page. https://www.factom.com/
- Gem. (2022). Gem main page. https://gem.com
- Gordon, W. J., & Catalini, C. (2018). Blockchain Technology for Healthcare: Facilitating the Transition to Patient-Driven Interoperability. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, 16, 224-230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2018.06.003
Go to original source...
- Hardin, T., & Kotz, D. (2019). Blockchain in health data systems: A survey. In 2019 sixth international conference on internet of things: Systems, management and security (pp. 490-497). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/IOTSMS48152.2019.8939174
Go to original source...
- HealthData.gov. (2022) Washington: Department of health and human services. https://www.va.gov/bluebutton
- HealthNautica. (2022). HealthNautica main page. https://www.healthnautica.com/comppages/index.asp
- HIMSS. (2020). Digital health. https://www.himss.org/resources/personal-health-records-electronic-health-records-key-indias-national-digital-health
- Hölbl, M., Kompara, M., Kami¹alię, A., & Nemec Zlatolas, L. (2018). A systematic review of the use of blockchain in healthcare. Symmetry, 10(10), 470. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym10100470
Go to original source...
- Khalaf, O. I., Abdulsahib, G. M., Kasmaei, H. D., & Ogudo, K. A. (2020). A New Algorithm on Application of Blockchain Technology in Live Stream Video Transmissions and Telecommunications. International Journal of E-Collaboration, 16(1), 16-32. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijec.2020010102
Go to original source...
- Li, H., Zhu, L., Shen, M., Gao, F., Tao, X., & Liu, S. (2018). Blockchain-Based Data Preservation System for Medical Data. Journal of Medical Systems, 42(8). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-0997-3
Go to original source...
- Liang, X., Zhao, J., Shetty, S., Liu, J., & Li, D. (2017). Integrating blockchain for data sharing and collaboration in mobile healthcare applications. In 2017 IEEE 28th annual international symposium on personal, indoor, and mobile radio communications (pp. 1-5). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/PIMRC.2017.8292361
Go to original source...
- Mayer, A. H., da Costa, C. A., & Righi, R. da R. (2020). Electronic health records in a Blockchain: A systematic review. Health Informatics Journal, 26(2), 1273-1288. https://doi.org/10.1177/1460458219866350
Go to original source...
- Pournaghi, S. M., Bayat, M., & Farjami, Y. (2020). MedSBA: a novel and secure scheme to share medical data based on blockchain technology and attribute-based encryption. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 11(11), 4613-4641. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-020-01710-y
Go to original source...
- Qin, Q., Jin, B., & Liu, Y. (2021). A Secure Storage and Sharing Scheme of Stroke Electronic Medical Records Based on Consortium Blockchain. BioMed Research International, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/6676171
Go to original source...
- Rajput, A. R., Li, Q., Ahvanooey, M. T., & Masood, I. (2019). EACMS: Emergency access control management system for personal health record based on blockchain. IEEE Access, 7, 84304-84317. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2917976
Go to original source...
- Ramani, V., Kumar, T., Bracken, A., Liyanage, M., & Ylianttila, M. (2018). Secure and efficient data accessibility in blockchain based healthcare systems. In 2018 IEEE Global Communications Conference (pp. 206-212). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOCOM.2018.8647221
Go to original source...
- Alam, S., Ahmad Reegu, F., Daud, S. M., & Shuaib, M. (2021). Blockchain-Based Electronic Health Record System for Efficient Covid-19 Pandemic Management. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202104.0771.v1
Go to original source...
- Sahoo, M. S., & Baruah, P. K. (2018). HBasechainDB - A Scalable Blockchain Framework on Hadoop Ecosystem. In Asian Conference on Supercomputing Frontiers (pp. 18-29). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69953-0_2
Go to original source...
- Sauermann, S., Frohner, M., Urbauer, P., Forjan, M., Pohn, B., Drauschke, B.A., & Mense, A. (2013). The adolescence of electronic health records: Status and perspectives for large scale implementation. Acta Informatica Pragensia, 2(1), 30-38. https://doi.org/10.18267/j.aip.11
Go to original source...
- Shahnaz, A., Qamar, U., & Khalid, A. (2019). Using blockchain for electronic health records. IEEE Access, 7, 147782-147795. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2946373
Go to original source...
- Shuaib, K., Saleous, H., Shuaib, K., & Zaki, N. (2019). Blockchains for secure digitized medicine. Journal of personalized medicine, 9(3), Article no. 35. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm9030035
Go to original source...
- Shuaib, M., Daud, S. M., Alam, S., & Khan, W. Z. (2020). Blockchain-based framework for secure and reliable land registry system. Telkomnika, 18(5), 2560-2571. https://doi.org/10.12928/TELKOMNIKA.v18i5.15787
Go to original source...
- Siddiqui, S. T., Ahmad, R., Shuaib, M., & Alam, S. (2020). Blockchain security threats, attacks and countermeasures. In Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (pp. 51-62). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1518-7_5
Go to original source...
- Thwin, T. T., & Vasupongayya, S. (2019). Blockchain-Based Access Control Model to Preserve Privacy for Personal Health Record Systems. Security and Communication Networks, 2019, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/8315614
Go to original source...
- Wang, H., & Song, Y. (2018). Secure Cloud-Based EHR System Using Attribute-Based Cryptosystem and Blockchain. Journal of Medical Systems, 42(8). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-0994-6
Go to original source...
- Xia, Q., Sifah, E. B., Smahi, A., Amofa, S., & Zhang, X. (2017). Bbds: Blockchain-based data sharing for electronic medical records in cloud environments. Information, 8(2), Article no. 44. https://doi.org/10.3390/info8020044
Go to original source...
- Zhang, A., & Lin, X. (2018). Towards Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing in e-Health Systems via Consortium Blockchain. Journal of Medical Systems, 42(8). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-0995-5
Go to original source...
- Zhao, Y., Cui, M., Zheng, L., Zhang, R., Meng, L., Gao, D., & Zhang, Y. (2019). Research on electronic medical record access control based on blockchain. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 15(11), 155014771988933. https://doi.org/10.1177/1550147719889330
Go to original source...
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is properly cited. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.