Enhancing health data integrity using Distributed Ledger Technology

Abstract

Nowadays, with the increased integration of cloud-computing, data integrity continues to be a problem in the current eHealth sector. This security principle is considered fundamental to ensure the accuracy and reliability of data by ensuring protection from unauthorized and illicit tampering. The present work aims to demonstrate the ability for the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to provide trust and confidence in the healthcare infrastructure for patients, healthcare professionals and policy makers. The DLT has the potential to become one of the most reliable solutions for the many challenges facing the healthcare industry for its potential to enable more secure, transparent, and equitable data management. Although much documentation exists about applications in this domain, it is mostly presented in high-level conceptualization, without detailing the actual development or implementation. This document proposes a metadata-based approach to protect healthcare data integrity in compliance with GDPR, ensuring trustworthy data access for end-users, while demonstrating that the solution can be deployed on low-resource hardware with minimal adaptation effort and time constraints.