Blockchain as a Foundation for Sharing Healthcare Data

Marek A Cyran
Marek A Cyran

Published: 23.03.2018.

Biochemistry

Volume 1, Issue 1 (2018)

https://doi.org/10.30953/bhty.v1.13

Abstract

Blockchain technology has the potential to transform healthcare delivery by facilitating data sharing between providers and electronic health record (EHR) systems. However, significant roadblocks stand in the way of widespread implementation of this technology across the healthcare industry. Our blockchainbased data-sharing solution addresses two of the most critical challenges associated with using blockchain for health data sharing: protecting sensitive health information and deploying and installing blockchain software across diverse hospital environments. Since transparency is a fundamental feature of blockchain, we enabled user- and group-based secret sharing by adding purpose-built software that leverages a collection of well-established cryptographic algorithms. To streamline deployment, we built a containerized solution that guarantees portability, simplifies installation, and reduces overhead maintenance costs associated with administration. To ensure ease of implementation in a hospital system, we designed our blockchain solution using a distributed microservices architecture that allows us to encapsulate core functions of our system into isolated services that can be scaled independently based on the requirements of a particular hospital system deployment. As part of this architecture, we built core components for securely handling cryptographic secrets, interacting with blockchain nodes, facilitating large file sharing, enabling secondary-index based lookups, and integrating external business logic that governs how users interact with Smart Contracts. The innovative design of our blockchain solution, which addresses critical data security, deployment, and installation challenges, provides the healthcare community with a unique approach that has the power to connect providers while protecting sensitive data. Keywords: Blockchain, Data Sharing, Data Exchange, EHR,electronic health record, Ethereum, interplanetary file system, IPFS  

Keywords

References

1.
Wood G. Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum Project Yellow Paper. 2014;
2.
Allen C. Evaluation of secp256k1 as Popular Alternate Curve. Lecture. 2017;
3.
Barker E, Chen L, Roginsky A, Smid M. Recommendation for pair-wise key establishment schemes using discrete logarithm cryptography. NIST special publication. 2007;800-56A.
4.
Daemen J, Rijmen V.
5.
Allen C. Evaluation of secp256k1 as Popular Alternate Curve. Lecture. 2017;

Citation

Copyright

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 

Article metrics

Google scholar: See link

The statements, opinions and data contained in the journal are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of the publisher and the editor(s). We stay neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Most read articles