Towards Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing in e-Health Systems via Consortium Blockchain

Abstract Objectives To introduce blockchain technologies, including their benefits, pitfalls, and the latest applications, to the biomedical and health care domains. Target Audience Biomedical and health care informatics researchers who would like to learn about blockchain technologies and their applications in the biomedical/health care domains. Scope The covered topics include: (1) introduction to the famous Bitcoin crypto-currency and the underlying blockchain technology; (2) features of blockchain; (3) review of alternative blockchain technologies; (4) emerging nonfinancial distributed ledger technologies and applications; (5) benefits of blockchain for biomedical/health care applications when compared to traditional distributed databases; (6) overview of the latest biomedical/health care applications of blockchain technologies; and (7) discussion of the potential challenges and proposed solutions of adopting blockchain technologies in biomedical/health care domains.

Healthcare data are a valuable source of healthcare intelligence. Sharing of healthcare data is one essential step to make healthcare system smarter and improve the quality of healthcare service. Healthcare data, one personal asset of patient, should be owned and controlled by patient, instead of being scattered in different healthcare systems, which prevents data sharing and puts patient privacy at risks. Blockchain is demonstrated in the financial field that trusted, auditable computing is possible using a decentralized network of peers accompanied by a public ledger. In this paper, we proposed an App (called Healthcare Data Gateway (HGD)) architecture based on blockchain to enable patient to own, control and share their own data easily and securely without violating privacy, which provides a new potential way to improve the intelligence of healthcare systems while keeping patient data private. Our proposed purpose-centric access model ensures patient own and control their healthcare data; simple unified Indicator-Centric Schema (ICS) makes it possible to organize all kinds of personal healthcare data practically and easily. We also point out that MPC (Secure Multi-Party Computing) is one promising solution to enable untrusted third-party to conduct computation over patient data without violating privacy.