Leveraging blockchain for cross-institution data sharing and authentication in mobile healthcare

Abstract

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has promoted the wide adoption of mobile medical devices, which monitor patients’ body conditions in real-time. The collected health-related data are highly sensitive, requiring careful protection during the accessing and transmission for specialized analysis. Yet, existing efforts either rely on centralized authentication for the numerous end devices or are designed to be partially distributed for a closed institution, both lacking scalability for mobile healthcare scenarios. In this paper, we propose HealthTrust that provides a generalized and flexible authentication scheme for distributed medical devices in the cross-institution context. With blockchain as the building block, HealthTrust jointly exploits smart contracts and secure authentication to attain controlled transmission and secure exchanging of healthcare data between institutions. We have implemented the system functions with a prototype based on Ethereum. Experimental results and safety analysis demonstrate that HealthTrust can well satisfy both the safety and feasibility requirements.