Blockchain-Enabled EHR Framework for Internet of Medical Things

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework for secure, decentralized, and auditable electronic health records in the Internet of Medical Things, enhancing privacy, control, and security for patients and medical providers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blockchain-enabled EHR system that ensures data security, privacy, and patient control within IoMT, addressing limitations of centralized health data management.

Findings

The framework guarantees data integrity and confidentiality.

It provides efficient access control and auditability.

Security analysis confirms robustness and performance efficiency.

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) offers an infrastructure made of smart medical equipment and software applications for health services. Through the internet, the IoMT is capable of providing remote medical diagnosis and timely health services. The patients can use their smart devices to create, store and share their electronic health records (EHR) with a variety of medical personnel including medical doctors and nurses. However, unless the underlying combination within IoMT is secured, malicious users can intercept, modify and even delete the sensitive EHR data of patients. Patients also lose full control of their EHR since most health services within IoMT are constructed under a centralized platform outsourced in the cloud. Therefore, it is appealing to design a decentralized, auditable and secure EHR system that guarantees absolute access control for the patients while ensuring privacy and security. Using the features of blockchain including decentralization, auditability and immutability, we propose a secure EHR framework which is mainly maintained by the medical centers. In this framework, the patients' EHR data are encrypted and stored in the servers of medical institutions while the corresponding hash values are kept on the blockchain. We make use of security primitives to offer authentication, integrity and confidentiality of EHR data while access control and immutability is guaranteed by the blockchain technology. The security analysis and performance evaluation of the proposed framework confirms its efficiency.