Empower Healthcare through a Self-Sovereign Identity Infrastructure for Secure Electronic Health Data Access

TL;DR

This paper presents a patient-centric, blockchain-based health data management framework utilizing Self-Sovereign Identity principles, enhancing security, privacy, and control over electronic health data through innovative technologies and use case scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel open-source framework combining SSI, blockchain, and agent-based models for secure, private, and patient-controlled health data management with specific recovery and emergency features.

Findings

Validated a proof of concept with patient-doctor interaction

Demonstrated improved data security and privacy controls

Outlined effective emergency access procedures

Abstract

Health data is one of the most sensitive data for people, which attracts the attention of malicious activities. We propose an open-source health data management framework, that follows a patient-centric approach. The proposed framework implements the Self-Sovereign Identity paradigm with innovative technologies such as Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials. The framework uses Blockchain technology to provide immutability, verifiable data registry, and auditability, as well as an agent-based model to provide protection and privacy for the patient data. We also define different use cases regarding the daily patient-practitioner-laboratory interactions and specific functions to cover patient data loss, data access revocation, and emergency cases where patients are unable to give consent and access to their data. To address this design, a proof of concept is created with an interaction between patient and doctor. The most feasible technologies are selected and the created design is validated. We discuss the differences and novelties of this framework, which includes the patient-centric approach also for data storage, the designed recovery and emergency plan, the defined backup procedure, and the selected blockchain platform.