Leveraging Blockchain Smart Contracts for Enhanced Data Integrity and Compliance in Healthcare

Abstract

As information technology underpins advances in life and healthcare sciences, there is a growing intersection of healthcare and information engineering that is opening new possibilities for remote health monitoring and the secure exchange of health information between patients and clinicians. To gain the trust of the citizens, healthcare technologies need to ensure that the information they store and process is confidential, has not been tampered with, and, in the case of large-scale processing, is conducted according to probabilistic compliance policies. Currently, the onus on data protection practices of healthcare technology providers is drawn from legislation. This paper outlines data integrity and compliance policies and shows how these can be encoded in a blockchain-based system. The study enhances this blockchain-based system to use the Ethereum blockchain for executing smart contracts, which can execute probabilistic compliance rewarding health-related workflows. These smart contracts increase transparency and data integrity by not only laying out a set of promises for citizens and public health physicians to monitor the state of a blockchain protocol to ensure there are no attempted violations, thus increasing the service's trustworthiness. While the security of the blockchain is used to ensure data privacy and security, all blockchain-located proxy healthcare data can only be accessed through patients appointing a blockchain address and the associated articulated smart contract at their own discretion, making the proposed solution particularly patient-centric.