Securing, Standardizing, and Simplifying Electronic Health Record Audit Logs Through Permissioned Blockchain Technology

Audit logs perform critical functions in electronic health record (EHR) systems. They provide a chronological record of all operations performed in an EHR, allowing health care organizations to track EHR usage, hold system users accountable for their interactions with patient records, detect anomalous and potentially malicious behavior in the system, protect patient privacy, and develop insight into workflows and interactions among system users. However, several problems exist with the way that current state-of-the-art EHR technology handles audit data. Specifically, current systems complicate the collection and analysis of audit logs because they lack an interoperable audit log structure, spread audit log data from different EHR applications across multiple data repositories, and often fail to record all useful information about events in the EHR. Permissioned blockchain technology offers two opportunities to mitigate these issues. First, smart contracts running on the blockchain can impose an interoperable structure on audit log data, both within single health care organizations and across all organizations participating in the network. Second, the blockchain ledger constitutes a consolidated repository for all audit log data at each organization, simplifying the collection of data for analysis. AuditChain, the prototype system I present in this thesis, leverages Hyperleger Fabric\u27s permissioned blockchain technology to address these issues of audit log interoperability, content, structure, and consolidation. Specifically, AuditChain uses the blockchain ledger and smart contracts to standardize audit log content, simplify access to audit log data, and ensure that audit logs contain all necessary and useful information

City Data Fusion: Sensor Data Fusion in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has gained substantial attention recently and play a significant role in smart city application deployments. A number of such smart city applications depend on sensor fusion capabilities in the cloud from diverse data sources. We introduce the concept of IoT and present in detail ten different parameters that govern our sensor data fusion evaluation framework. We then evaluate the current state-of-the art in sensor data fusion against our sensor data fusion framework. Our main goal is to examine and survey different sensor data fusion research efforts based on our evaluation framework. The major open research issues related to sensor data fusion are also presented.Comment: Accepted to be published in International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST), 201

Data interoperability and privacy schemes in healthcare data using Blockchain technology

Abstract. Electronic Health/Medical Records (EHR/EMR) lay the foundation for securely maintaining medical records. The traditional EHR systems are not effectively managed data manipulation, delayed communication, trustless data storage, data cooperation, and distribution. Blockchain technology can play a major role in healthcare cases. This is because it uses decentralized distributed ledgers to securely manage all parties within the network. It also handles individual data through smart contracts, which can be pre-programmed by the patient for access and maintenance of healthcare data. This thesis focuses on exploring the blockchain in digital healthcare services such as Electronic Health/Medical Records (EHR/EMR). Blockchain-based implementations of Ethereum allow patients to store their medical data with smart contracts that can perform activities such as Registration, Data Append, and Data Retrieve. The challenges faced during the implementation of blockchain protocols are discussed and analyzed in the scope of finding sustainable solutions to develop secure and reliable operation