Biometric-Based Blockchain EHR System (BBEHR)

Abstract

In healthcare sector, the move towards Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems has been accelerating in parallel with the increased adoption of IoT and smart devices. This is driven by the anticipated advantages for patients and healthcare providers. The integration of EHR and IoT makes it highly heterogenous in terms of devices, network standard, platforms, types data, connectivity, etc., and introduces security, patient and data privacy, and trust challenges. To address such challenges, this paper proposes an architecture that combines biometric-based blockchain technology with the EHR system. This integration ensures the integrity of data to control the access to the patient's Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) that are synchronized and exchanged, using Blockchain Technology, between distributed healthcare providers. More specifically, this paper describes a mechanism that enables the recovery of patient's access control on their EHRs securely without compromising their privacy and identity. A biometric-based blockchain EHR system (BBEHR) is proposed to uniquely identify patients, enable them to control access to their EHRs, and ensure recoverable access to their EHRs. The system takes into account the security and privacy requirements of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance, and it overcomes the challenges of using secret keys to control access to EHRs, in the cases of lost secret keys and the need for emergency access to EHRs without the presence of secret keys.