A Patient-centric Blockchain-based system for access management in telehealth and telemedicine domain

Abstract

The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices enable healthcare providers to remotely collect and instantly process patient’s health data for monitoring and diagnosis. In COVID-19-like virus scenario, the social destination is crucial to avoid virus propagation. Thus, such wearable devices can mitigate the spread of virus, and provide important information of patients such as breathing patterns, blood glucose level, and blood pressure to health providers. Hence, the health-related devices also generate a large amount of medical data. As a result, many of these data are exposed to privacy breach, data leakage, and other security-related issues. Blockchain as a prominent technology can mitigate the privacy and security issues in the telemedicine and telehealth systems. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based system for access management in telehealth and telemedicine domain. The main purpose of this work is to build a patient-centric access management system that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union. Hence, it also aims to record all access management related data in an immutable ledger which gives more transparency over shared data. In addition, we use Ethereum built-in environment to develop our smart contract and Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to store patient’s data. We conducted a security analysis using Oyente tool, to demonstrate that our smart contract code is sufficiently secure against common security vulnerabilities.