A Framework for Secure Healthcare Data Management using Blockchain Technology

In the current era of smart cities and smart homes, the patient’s data like name, personal details and disease description are highly insecure and violated most often. These details are stored digitally in a network called Electronic Health Record (EHR). The EHR can be useful for future medical researches to enhance patients’ healthcare and the performance of clinical practices. These data cannot be accessible for the patients and their caretakers, but they are readily available for unauthorized external agencies and are easily breached by hackers. This creates an imbalance in data accessibility and security. This can be resolved by using blockchain technology. The blockchain creates an immutable ledger and makes the transaction to be decentralized. The blockchain has three key features namely Security, Transparency, and Decentralization. These key features make the system to be highly secured, prevent data manipulation, and can only be accessible by authorized persons. In this paper, a blockchain-based security framework has been proposed to secure the EHR and provide a safe way of accessing the clinical data of the patients for the patients and their caretakers, doctors, and insurance agents using cryptography and decentralization. The proposed system also maintains the balance between data accessibility and security. This paper also establishes how the proposed framework helps doctors, patients, caretakers, and external authorities to securely store and access patients’ medical data in EHR.