Privacy-Preserving in Healthcare Blockchain Systems Based on Lightweight Message Sharing

Abstract

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are extremely important for patients’ treatment, doctors’ diagnoses, and medical technology development. In recent years, the distributed healthcare blockchain system has been researched for solving the information isolated island problem in centralized healthcare service systems. However, there still exists a series of important problems such as the patients’ sensitive information security, cross-institutional data sharing, medical quality, and efficiency. In this paper, we establish a lightweight privacy-preserving mechanism for a healthcare blockchain system. First, we apply an interleaving encoder to encrypt the original EMRs. This can hide the sensitive information of EMRs to protect the patient’s privacy security. Second, a ( t , n )-threshold lightweight message sharing scheme is presented. The EMRs are mapped to n different short shares, and it can be reconstructed by at least t shares. The EMR shares rather than the original EMRs are stored in the blockchain nodes. This can guarantee high security for EMR sharing and improve the data reconstruction efficiency. Third, the indexes of the stored EMR shares are employed to generate blocks that are chained together and finally form a blockchain. The authorized data users or institutions can recover an EMR by requesting at least t shares of the EMR from the blockchain nodes. In this way, the healthcare blockchain system can not only facilitate the cross-institution sharing process, but also provide proper protections for the EMRs. The security proof and analysis indicate that the proposed scheme can protect the privacy and security of patients’ medical information. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme is more efficient than similar literature in terms of energy consumption and storage space, and the healthcare blockchain system is more stable with the proposed message sharing scheme.

The Recent Progress and Applications of Digital Technologies in Healthcare: A Review

“…According to IBM, 70% of healthcare leaders predict that the block-chain's greatest influence in healthcare will be to improve clinical trial management, regulatory compliance, and a decentralized structure for sharing electronic medical records. The global market for healthcare blockchain technology is expected to exceed $500 million by 2022 [60,61].…”

A Traditional Chinese Medicine Traceability System Based on Lightweight Blockchain

“…Lwin et al [ 26 ] built a lightweight trust system with a consensus algorithm; their scheme distributes nodes in a mobile ad hoc network to create a tamperproof and optimized link state routing protocol. Fu et al [ 27 ] used an interleaving encoding algorithm to propose a lightweight message sharing scheme. This scheme applies an interleaving encoder to conceal sensitive information.…”

“…EMRs are mapped to n different short shares, and the shares are transmitted to different nodes on the blockchain. Fu’s sharing scheme reduces the cost of shorter shares and provides an efficient reconstruction process; moreover, the use of indexes increases the system stability [ 27 ].…”

HealthyBlock: Blockchain-Based IT Architecture for Electronic Medical Records Resilient to Connectivity Failures

“…There are other related papers [ 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 ], which proposed blockchain-based EMR architectures, that addressed different approaches to ensuring privacy in electronic medical record systems. Due to the above and given that privacy for electronic medical records is regulated by government laws [ 6 , 36 ], a review of the literature on this topic was carried out.…”