AegisBlock: A Privacy-Preserving Medical Research Framework using Blockchain

TL;DR

AegisBlock is a blockchain-based framework that enables privacy-preserving, patient-controlled access to medical records for research, ensuring data trustworthiness and compliance with privacy regulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel patient-centric, blockchain-enabled system for secure medical data sharing with verified access control and scalability.

Findings

Scalable with increasing patients and hospitals

Maintains patient anonymity during research data sharing

Operates efficiently even with 50% malicious miners

Abstract

Due to HIPAA and other privacy regulations, it is imperative to maintain patient privacy while conducting research on patient health records. In this paper, we propose AegisBlock, a patient-centric access controlled framework to share medical records with researchers such that the anonymity of the patient is maintained while ensuring the trustworthiness of the data provided to researchers. AegisBlock allows for patients to provide access to their medical data, verified by miners. A researcher submits a time-based range query to request access to records from a certain patient, and upon patient approval, access will be granted. Our experimental evaluation results show that AegisBlock is scalable with respect to the number of patients and hospitals in the system, and efficient with up to 50% of malicious miners.