Data Ownership Confirmation and Privacy-Free Search for Blockchain-Based Medical Data Sharing

Abstract

With the development of data mining technology and the arrival of the era of big data, people can get more and more knowledge and information from the data. However, electronic medical data are stored in isolated data silos within each hospital due to the privacy and competition. Because of the complex interests of various groups, there is a lack of data flow between medical entities. On the one hand, this leads to difficulties for patients to obtain their own electronic medical data and to referral between different hospitals. On the other hand, it has led to serious lack of actual data for medical researchers. The realization of the determination of medical data ownership is the first condition for realizing medical data circulation. How to retrieve the required medical data while protecting privacy is the second problem to be solved.

In this paper, we design the medical metadata as the smallest subunit of data ownership confirmation and propose a blockchain-based medical data sharing Framework MDSF, which can be used for electronic medical data ownership confirmation and data search while protecting patient privacy. We use the petri nets to verify the system and prove its reachability and boundedness, which means it can realize its designed function and operate safely. The system provides users with a convenient and safe way to obtain their past medical data, also enables research institutions engaged in medical data mining to easily search and obtain the actual medical data needed after desensitization. Thereby the circulation of medical data between different hospitals, individuals and research institutions is realized.