A Blockchain-based Data Governance Framework with Privacy Protection and Provenance for e-Prescription

TL;DR

This paper presents a blockchain-based framework for healthcare data governance that ensures privacy, provenance, and consent management, demonstrated through a digital e-prescription use case with minimal overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized data governance framework combining blockchain and proxy re-encryption for privacy and provenance in sensitive data sharing.

Findings

Framework guarantees transparency, privacy, and trust.

Implementation shows minimal overhead in real-world blockchain platforms.

Effective management of patient prescription data with multi-stakeholder control.

Abstract

Real-world applications in healthcare and supply chain domains produce, exchange, and share data in a multi-stakeholder environment. Data owners want to control their data and privacy in such settings. On the other hand, data consumers demand methods to understand when, how, and who produced the data. These requirements necessitate data governance frameworks that guarantee data provenance, privacy protection, and consent management. We introduce a decentralized data governance framework based on blockchain technology and proxy re-encryption to let data owners control and track their data through privacy-enhancing and consent management mechanisms. Besides, our framework allows the data consumers to understand data lineage through a blockchain-based provenance mechanism. We have used Digital e-prescription as the use case since it has multiple stakeholders and sensitive data while enabling the medical fraternity to manage patients' prescription data, involving patients as data owners, doctors and pharmacists as data consumers. Our proof-of-concept implementation and evaluation results based on CosmWasm, Ethereum, and pyUmbral PRE show that the proposed decentralized system guarantees transparency, privacy, and trust with minimal overhead.