Institute for Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities, Victoria University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
School of Information Science and Engineering, University of Jinan, Jinan, China.
PLoS One. 2020 Dec 9;15(12):e0243043. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243043. eCollection 2020.
The privacy of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is facing a major hurdle with outsourcing private health data in the cloud as there exists danger of leaking health information to unauthorized parties. In fact, EHRs are stored on centralized databases that increases the security risk footprint and requires trust in a single authority which cannot effectively protect data from internal attacks. This research focuses on ensuring the patient privacy and data security while sharing the sensitive data across same or different organisations as well as healthcare providers in a distributed environment. This research develops a privacy-preserving framework viz Healthchain based on Blockchain technology that maintains security, privacy, scalability and integrity of the e-health data. The Blockchain is built on Hyperledger fabric, a permissioned distributed ledger solutions by using Hyperledger composer and stores EHRs by utilizing InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to build this healthchain framework. Moreover, the data stored in the IPFS is encrypted by using a unique cryptographic public key encryption algorithm to create a robust blockchain solution for electronic health data. The objective of the research is to provide a foundation for developing security solutions against cyber-attacks by exploiting the inherent features of the blockchain, and thus contribute to the robustness of healthcare information sharing environments. Through the results, the proposed model shows that the healthcare records are not traceable to unauthorized access as the model stores only the encrypted hash of the records that proves effectiveness in terms of data security, enhanced data privacy, improved data scalability, interoperability and data integrity while sharing and accessing medical records among stakeholders across the healthchain network.
电子健康记录 (EHRs) 的隐私正面临着一个重大障碍，即将私人健康数据外包到云中，因为存在向未经授权的各方泄露健康信息的危险。事实上，EHRs 存储在集中式数据库中，这增加了安全风险足迹，并需要信任单一权威机构，但单一权威机构无法有效地保护数据免受内部攻击。本研究专注于在分布式环境中确保患者隐私和数据安全，同时在相同或不同组织以及医疗保健提供者之间共享敏感数据。本研究开发了一种基于区块链技术的隐私保护框架，即 Healthchain，该框架可维护电子健康数据的安全性、隐私性、可扩展性和完整性。区块链建立在 Hyperledger fabric 之上，这是一种由 Hyperledger composer 使用的许可分布式账本解决方案，并利用星际文件系统 (IPFS) 存储 EHRs，以构建这个 healthchain 框架。此外，使用唯一的公钥加密算法对存储在 IPFS 中的数据进行加密，为电子健康数据创建一个强大的区块链解决方案。本研究的目标是通过利用区块链的固有特性为开发针对网络攻击的安全解决方案提供基础，从而为医疗信息共享环境的稳健性做出贡献。通过结果表明，所提出的模型表明，由于模型仅存储记录的加密哈希，因此医疗记录是无法追踪到未经授权的访问的，从而在数据安全性、增强的数据隐私性、提高的数据可扩展性、互操作性和数据完整性方面具有有效性，同时在 healthchain 网络中的利益相关者之间共享和访问医疗记录。
