Improving Privacy Protection in a Collaborative Blockchain-based E-Health Records System

Healthcare industry is going through a rapid change due to emerging digital technologies. Blockchain has proved to a frontrunner in revolutionizing electronic health record (EHR) systems. We describe the paradigm shift in healthcare and related applications as a result of Blockchain. Due to its enviable features and mainly the distributed, trusted and transparent ledger, blockchain provides essential ingredients of a distributed and secure electronic health record system. Privacy protection has still remained as a main impediment in deploying a collaborative integrated blockchain-based HER system among various health providers. In this paper, we analyze and address the privacy concerns in this environment and provide a novel solution for privacy preserving in a scalable solution using meta-data disaggregation, two-tier encryption and access control techniques. The proposed solution is based on a patient-centric dynamic role-based access control considering various parties in a healthcare environment including doctors, personnel and drugstores. Smart contracts are developed and implemented to enact the proposed solution. The transaction rate and system’s security properties are analyzed and it is shown that the proposed technique satisfies all the pre-set objectives.