Abstract
This paper is dedicated to investigating the application of blockchain in eHealth systems. Unlike the previous work, patients here play a supervisory role and allow medical institutions to legally use their medical data without prior authorization but own the right to manage the medical data. This concept is able to protect the rights and interests of patients without affecting the normal diagnosis and research work of medical institutions. On this basis, a blockchain-based access control scheme for eHealth systems is proposed. To encourage patients to actively share their medical data, an incentive mechanism is also included. Finally, a case study on Ethereum is given to illustrate the feasibility and practicality of the proposed method.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Azaria A, Ekblaw A, Vieira T, Lippman A (2016) Medrec: using blockchain for medical data access and permission management. In: 2016 2nd international conference on open and big data. IEEE, 2016, pp 25–30
Chen HS, Jarrell JT, Carpenter KA, Cohen DS, Huang X (2019) Blockchain in healthcare: a patient-centered model. Biomed J Sci Tech Res 20(3):15017–15022
Chen L, Lee W, Chang C, Choo KR (2019) Blockchain based searchable encryption for electronic health record sharing. Future Gener Comp Sy 95:420–429
Chen Y, Ding S, Xu Z, Zheng H, Yang S (2019) Blockchain-based medical records secure storage and medical service framework. J Med Syst 43:1–9
Chenthara S, Ahmed K, Wang H, Whittaker F (2019) Security and privacy-preserving challenges of e-health solutions in cloud computing. IEEE Access 7:74361–74382
Dagher GG, Mohler J, Milojkovic M, Marella PB (2018) Ancile: privacy-preserving framework for access control and interoperability of electronic health records using blockchain technology. Sustain Cities Soc 39:283–297
Dias JP, Reis L, Ferreira HS, Martins  (2018) Blockchain for access control in e-health scenarios. [Online]. Available: arXiv:1805.12267
Ekblaw A, Azaria A, Halamka JD, Lippman A (2016) A case study for blockchain in healthcare: “medrec” prototype for electronic health records and medical research data. [Online]. Available: https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/5-56-onc_blockchainchallenge_mitwhitepaper.pdf
Esposito C, Santis AD, Tortora G, Chang H, Choo KR (2018) Blockchain: a panacea for healthcare cloud-based data security and privacy? IEEE Cloud Computing 5(1):31–37
Fan K, Wang S, Ren Y, Li H, Yang Y (2018) Medblock: efficient and secure medical data sharing via blockchain. J Med Syst 42:1–11
Gao Y, Chen X, Chen Y, Sun Y, Niu X, Yang Y (2018) A secure cryptocurrency scheme based on post-quantum blockchain. IEEE Access 6:27205–27213
Geth-go implementaion of ethereum protocol. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
Gordon WJ, Catalini C (2018) Blockchain technology for healthcare: facilitating the transition to patient-driven interoperability. Computat Struct Biotec 16:224–30
Griggs KN, Ossipova O, Kohlios CP, Baccarini AN, Howson EA, Hayajneh T (2018) Healthcare blockchain system using smart contracts for secure automated remote patient monitoring. J Med Syst 42:1–7
Guo H, Li W, Nejad M, Shen C (2019) Access control for electronic health records with hybrid blockchain-edge architecture. In: 2019 IEEE international conference on blockchain (blockchain). IEEE, 2019, pp 1–8
Hyla T, Pejaś J (2019) Ehealth integrity model based on permissioned blockchain. Future Internet 11(3):1–14
Khatoon A (2020) A blockchain-based smart contract system for healthcare management. Electronics 9(1):1–23
Khezr S, Moniruzzaman M, Yassine A, Benlamri R (2019) Blockchain technology in healthcare: a comprehensive review and directions for future research. Appl Sci 9(9):1–28
Kish LJ, Topol EJ (2015) Unpatients-why patients should own their medical data. Nat Biotechnol 33(9):921–924
Li H, Yang Y, Dai Y, Yu S, Xiang Y (2017) Achieving secure and efficient dynamic searchable symmetric encryption over medical cloud data. IEEE Trans Cloud Comput 2017:1–11
Li H, Zhu L, Shen M, Gao F, Tao X, Liu S (2018) Blockchain-based data preservation system for medical data. J Med Syst 42:1–13
Mehmood A, Natgunanathan I, Xiang Y, Poston H, Zhang Y (2018) Anonymous authentication scheme for smart cloud based healthcare applications. IEEE Access 6:33552–33567
Nakamoto S (2008) Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. [online]. Available: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Nguyen DC, Pathirana PN, Ding M, Seneviratne A (2019) Blockchain for secure EHRs sharing of mobile cloud based e-health systems. IEEE Access 7:66792–66806
Omar AA, Rahman MS, Basu A, Kiyomoto S (2017) Medibchain: a blockchain based privacy preserving platform for healthcare data. In: International conference on security, privacy and anonymity in computation, communication and storage. Springer, 2017, pp 534–543
Omar AA, Rahman MS, Basu A, Kiyomoto S (2019) Privacy-friendly platform for healthcare data in cloud based on blockchain environment. Future Gener Comp Sy 95:511–521
Premarathne U, Abuadbba A, Alabdulatif A, Khalil I, Tari Z, Zomaya A, Buyya R (2016) Hybrid cryptographic access control for cloud-based EHR systems. IEEE Cloud Computing 3(4):58–64
Pussewalage HSG, Oleshchuk VA (2018) Blockchain based delegatable access control scheme for a collaborative e-health environment. In: 2018 IEEE international conference on internet of things (ithings) and IEEE green computing and communications (greencom) and IEEE cyber, physical and social computing (CPSCom) and IEEE smart data (smartdata). IEEE, 2018, pp 1–9
Rabah K (2017) Challenges & opportunities for blockchain powered healthcare systems: a review. Mara Research Journal of Medicine and Health Sciences 1(1):45–52
Remix-IDE for smart contract deployment provided by ethereum. [Online]. Available: https://remix.ethereum.org
Rifi N, Rachkidi E, Agoulmine N, Taher NC (2017) Towards using blockchain technology for ehealth data access management. In: 2017 fourth international conference on advances in biomedical engineering (ICABME). IEEE, 2017, pp 1–4
Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information: Final Rule, Standard 45 CFR Parts 160 and 164, 2000
Standard Specification for Continuity of Care Record (CCR), Standard ASTM E2369, 2005
Tang F, Ma S, Xiang Y, Lin C (2019) An efficient authentication scheme for blockchain-based electronic health records. IEEE Access 7:41678–41689
Tanwar S, Parekh K, Evans R (2020) Blockchain-based electronic healthcare record system for healthcare 4.0 applications. J Inf Secur Appl 50:1–13
Thwin TT, Vasupongayya S (2018) Blockchain-based access control model to preserve privacy for personal health record systems. Secur Commun Netw 2018:1–16
Tripathi G, Ahad MA, Paiva S (2019) S2HS- a blockchain based approach for smart healthcare system. Healthcare. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hjdsi.2019.100391
Wang H, Song Y (2018) Secure cloud-based EHR system using attribute-based cryptosystem and blockchain. J Med Syst 42(8):1–9
Wang J, Han K, Alexandridis A, Chen Z, Zilic Z, Pang Y, Jeon G, Piccialli F (2019) A blockchain-based ehealthcare system interoperating with WBANs. Future Gener Comp Sy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2019.09.049
Wang R, Liu H, Wang H, Yang Q, Wu D (2019) Distributed security architecture based on blockchain for connected health: architecture, challenges, and approaches. IEEE Wirel Commun 26(6):30–36
Web3 javascript API to interact with ethreum nodes. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JavaScript-API
Xia Q, Sifah EB, Smahi A, Amofa S, Zhang X (2017) BBDS: blockchain-based data sharing for electronic medical records in cloud environments. Information 8(2):1–16
Zhang A, Lin X (2018) Towards secure and privacy-preserving data sharing in e-health systems via consortium blockchain. J Med Syst 42:1–18
Zhang P, White J, Schmidt DC, Lenz G, Rosenbloom ST (2018) FHIRChain: applying blockchain to securely and scalably share clinical data. Computat Struct Biotec 16:267–278
Zhu Q, Loke SW, Trujillo-Rasua R, Jiang F, Xiang Y (2019) Applications of distributed ledger technologies to the internet of things: a survey. ACM Comput Surv 52(6):1–34
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their valuable comments and suggestions. This work is supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61702066 and 11747125), Major Project of Science and Technology Research Program of Chongqing Education Commission of China (Grant No. KJZD-M201900601), Chongqing Research Program of Basic Research and Frontier Technology (Grant Nos. cstc2017jcyjAX0256 and cstc2018jcyjAX0154), Project Supported by Chongqing Municipal Key Laboratory of Institutions of Higher Education (Grant No. cqupt-mct-201901), Technology Foundation of Guizhou Province (QianKeHeJiChu[2020]1Y269), and New academic seedling cultivation and exploration innovation project (QianKeHe Platform Talents[2017]5789-21).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interests
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gan, C., Saini, A., Zhu, Q. et al. Blockchain-based access control scheme with incentive mechanism for eHealth systems: patient as supervisor. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 30605–30621 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09322-6
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09322-6