Access Control Framework based on Smart Contract for Healthcare Systems

Abstract

Despite the introduction of blockchain technology through Bitcoin, its usage has been extended to non-financial applications like medical record management; it is still an open research area due to the rising issues of patient data availability and its security. Various blockchain based electronic record management systems have been proposed. But the need for understanding, evaluating and characterizing the employment of blockchain in healthcare sector, is greatly felt. In this paper, a Smart Contract based access control framework for securing electronic medical records is proposed. It ensures the security and authenticity of the health data of the patient by encrypting the data with cryptographic schemes. This framework is designed in order to improve on the existing systems by ensuring security, interoperability and effective access to the hospitals, health care providers, patients, doctors and any other third party along with ensuring the privacy of the EMR owner. The evaluation of this framework’s performance is extensively carried out through Apache JMeter and the results indicate the effectiveness of our proposal in healthcare data management at reduced latencies.