Enhancing Privacy Preserving in Healthcare Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Healthcare data is among the most sensitive and frequently targeted information in the digital era. Existing centralised Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are vulnerable to data breaches, unauthorised access, and single-point failures. This paper introduces a blockchain-based privacy-preserving framework for healthcare data management that integrates smart contracts, attribute-based encryption (ABE), and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) to ensure tamper-proof, role-gated data access. Our system is deployed on a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric network with a RESTful API gateway and a React-based patient portal. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed system achieves 99.2% access-control policy enforcement, reduces unauthorised access incidents to near zero, and maintains record retrieval latency under 180 ms at the 95th percentile. The framework also supports HIPAA and GDPR compliance through immutable audit trails and consent lifecycle management