Performance Evaluation of Secured Blockchain-Based Patient Health Records Sharing Framework

Abstract

With the healthcare system’s ongoing digital transformation and the need for patient data sharing to become an essential step to understanding the patient’s health history, cyber security must stay at the forefront and be made a top priority. As a result, most existing data-sharing systems depend on trusted third parties. As a result, these systems lack interoperability, data fragmentation, integrity, security, and privacy. In our previous work, we designed a framework based on Blockchain to secure patient health records exchange(SPHRS) that is fully controlled by the patient in terms of revoking or granting access and creating access policies for care providers. The framework achieves security by using smart contracts for user identity authentication and verification. The distributed IPFS storage is applied to store the encrypted patient health records and ensure immutability. In addition, NuCypher software takes advantage of a proxy re-encryption protocol to store the encryption and decryption keys securely. In this study, we assess the framework’s performance by testing metrics such as blockchain transactions’ gas consumption, throughput, Average response time, and average. Bytes. Furthermore, the security of the framework is discussed. SPHRS demonstrates how we can establish a novel approach to efficiently secure patient health record sharing. However, it shows a promising result that can potentially transform the digital patient healthcare system.