Blockchain scheme for decentralization in healthcare

Abstract

Centralization of many of healthcare data management systems in use today raises the risk of a single point of failure in case of natural disaster. Blockchain is decentralized technology that securely records and verifies transactions across multiple computers, making it difficult to manipulate or change recorded data. Requirements in the medical sector include auditability of transactions, revocation and access privileges to patient records for particular entity. With exponential increase in patient records in healthcare and prevalence of security breaches, it is imperative to implement appropriate security measures, specifically selective access control, to ensure controlled and limited access to crucial patient records. Increasing volume of patient records cannot be handled by current blockchain based access control (AC) systems while maintaining the necessary level of security. These systems are created to meet needs of patient records. In this paper, we propose a new approach for scalable Selective Access Control (SAC) to manage patient records in healthcare systems using Blockchain Technology (BCT). The tamper-proof nature of blockchain makes it an ideal contender to serve as a foundation of trust. The system is resistant to a variety of security assaults. The approach has a proof-of-concept implementation that has been set up on Ethereum. A performance analysis of proposed system is evaluated using JMeter.