A blockchain-based preserving and sharing system for medical data privacy

Abstract With the rapid development of information and network technology, hospital information systems (HIS) has also become a hot research area. However, data could be subjected to the threat of security attacks, leakage, tampering, and forgery during medical data transmissions, data storage, and sharing based on public networks and cloud environments. The immutability, decentralization and anonymity of the blockchain provided new ways for solving the aforementioned problems. This paper proposes a complete medical information system model based on blockchain technology, to realize the goal of safe storage and sharing of medical data. A data collection system based on Internet of Things (IoT) was also developed that can simultaneously collect data from different types of non-invasive medical instruments to realize real-time collection of patient health record during surgery (SHR). This system designed an anonymous medical data sharing scheme based on cloud servers and proxy re-encryption algorithm to improve the security of private medical data sharing. The system was implemented based on the permissioned blockchain architecture Hyperledger Fabric, and a dual-channel Fabric deployment architecture and medical chaincode were designed for data management and access control. We also carried out computing overhead test, performance test and safety evaluation on the system, and the test results meet the requirements of actual medical production environment. The research work of this paper provides means for remote diagnosis and treatment, data mining and other practical applications based on the medical data on the blockchain.