Electronic Health Record Sharing and Access Controlling Blockchain Architecture using Data De-identi cation Method

Abstract

The process of digitizing the health records of patients revolutionized the healthcare system as we know it today. Electronic Health Record (EHR)s, the digital records of patients, demand highest security among all data as healthcare organizations have more than 60% higher costs associated with data breaches than the cross-industry average. But they are also needed to be shared among researchers and medical personnel to improve medical service and research. Main security concern for EHRs is that intruders can delete or tamper them, giving bene ts to care-givers by hiding medical malpractices (e.g. misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis) or care-receivers by creating false data helping them to claim insurance money. In this paper, we aim to use blockchain beyond the eld of cryptocurrency to build a system, such that even after access is provided to researchers or medical personnel, EHRs remain untampered and the identities of patients can't be revealed or traced back. However, this has to be done in such a way that the authenticity of EHRs remain established, and in the event of changing of care team, the new team will have access to complete and unchanged EHRs without hassle. But we acknowledge the limited storage capacity of the existing blockchain system. We need a system that can relieve huge storage and computation burden from the blockchain system. We will continue to use traditional cloud storage system to store information while saving the indexes of EHRs in a Blockchain to ensure integrity and increase scalability. We will ensure secure data sharing by applying random selection of data de-identi cation methods that guarantees integrity, security and trackability of user data without revealing user identity. Lastly, we will present a complete architecture of the proposed system with two levels of blockchain that ensures secure and e cient implementation of EHR.