NFT-Enabled Smart Contracts for Privacy-Preserving and Supervised Collaborative Healthcare Workflows

Abstract

Healthcare collaborative processes still encounter major challenges, particularly regarding the interoperability of heterogeneous information systems, the traceability of medical interventions, and the secure sharing of patient data under strict privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This paper presents a patient-centric, blockchain-based framework designed to overcome these limitations. The proposed solution integrates smart contracts and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) within the Ethereum blockchain to ensure data integrity, traceability, and privacy preservation. Furthermore, a compliance-by-design mechanism is embedded into the smart contracts to enable self-supervision of collaborative workflows without third-party intervention. A Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus protocol is also adopted to optimize validation efficiency and significantly reduce computational and energy costs.