Permission-Based Blockchain with Proof of Authority for Secured Healthcare Data Sharing

Abstract

Electronic exchange of healthcare data between hospitals and institutions is limited by privacy, interoperability, and dependency on centralized data management systems. Sharing patients' data without their consent is a violation of the law and bears the risk of identity hack and misuse of healthcare data. Not all healthcare institutions follow a similar structure and semantic to store patients' data, making it almost impossible to share the data for research and better patient management. Centralized data management system is vulnerable to cyberattacks and data theft. It also creates lock-in problems for patients intending to migrate their data to any other institute. In this paper, a permissioned Blockchain with Proof of Authority (PoA) technology has been proposed that guarantees data privacy, data owner's control on sharing their sensitive information, and effective distributed management of healthcare records. It also addresses the importance of managing medical records in an interoperable manner, and the use of de facto standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources (FHIR), which helps the meaningful exchange of healthcare records among all participants. The work is based on simulating the outcome of using PoA to understand the efficacy of this consensus algorithm when using Blockchain technology for secure data sharing.