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

Blockchain for global vaccinations efforts: State of the art, challenges, and future directions

The emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global crisis negatively affected all aspects of human life. One of the most important methods used worldwide to survive this global crisis is the vaccination process to circumvent the proliferation of this pandemic. Many restrictions were alleviated in many countries such as access to public facilities and events. There is a huge amount of data about vaccination campaigns that are collected and maintained worldwide. Although the vaccination data can be analyzed to find out how the alleviation of restrictions can be applied if the data management process requires preserving key aspects like trust, transparency, and availability for easy and reliable access to such data. In this regard, blockchain technology is an excellent choice for meeting the requirements and providing a secure trusted framework for global verification. In this article, the related literature on blockchain technology is surveyed and summarized for all systems that embody solutions. The pros and cons of each solution are presented and provide a comparative summary. Furthermore, a detailed analysis is given to present the current problems and provide a promising mechanism to verify the vaccinated persons anywhere in the world, in a secure manner while retaining individual privacy

A privacy-preserving data storage and service framework based on deep learning and blockchain for construction workers' wearable IoT sensors

Classifying brain signals collected by wearable Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, especially brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), is one of the fastest-growing areas of research. However, research has mostly ignored the secure storage and privacy protection issues of collected personal neurophysiological data. Therefore, in this article, we try to bridge this gap and propose a secure privacy-preserving protocol for implementing BCI applications. We first transformed brain signals into images and used generative adversarial network to generate synthetic signals to protect data privacy. Subsequently, we applied the paradigm of transfer learning for signal classification. The proposed method was evaluated by a case study and results indicate that real electroencephalogram data augmented with artificially generated samples provide superior classification performance. In addition, we proposed a blockchain-based scheme and developed a prototype on Ethereum, which aims to make storing, querying and sharing personal neurophysiological data and analysis reports secure and privacy-aware. The rights of three main transaction bodies - construction workers, BCI service providers and project managers - are described and the advantages of the proposed system are discussed. We believe this paper provides a well-rounded solution to safeguard private data against cyber-attacks, level the playing field for BCI application developers, and to the end improve professional well-being in the industry

Is Blockchain for Internet of Medical Things a Panacea for COVID-19 Pandemic?

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of blockchain-enabled IoMT by introducing blockchain to incumbent IoMT systems. In this paper, we review the benefits of this architecture and illustrate the opportunities brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT. We also provide use cases of blockchain-enabled IoMT on fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, including the prevention of infectious diseases, location sharing and contact tracing, and the supply chain of injectable medicines. We also outline future work in this area.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

Data trust framework using blockchain and smart contracts

Lack of trust is the main barrier preventing more widespread data sharing. The lack of transparent and reliable infrastructure for data sharing prevents many data owners from sharing their data. Data trust is a paradigm that facilitates data sharing by forcing data controllers to be transparent about the process of sharing and reusing data. Blockchain technology has the potential to present the essential properties for creating a practical and secure data trust framework by transforming current auditing practices and automatic enforcement of smart contracts logic without relying on intermediaries to establish trust. Blockchain holds an enormous potential to remove the barriers of traditional centralized applications and propose a distributed and transparent administration by employing the involved parties to maintain consensus on the ledger. Furthermore, smart contracts are a programmable component that provides blockchain with more flexible and powerful capabilities. Recent advances in blockchain platforms toward smart contracts' development have revealed the possibility of implementing blockchain-based applications in various domains, such as health care, supply chain and digital identity. This dissertation investigates the blockchain's potential to present a framework for data trust. It starts with a comprehensive study of smart contracts as the main component of blockchain for developing decentralized data trust. Interrelated, three decentralized applications that address data sharing and access control problems in various fields, including healthcare data sharing, business process, and physical access control system, have been developed and examined. In addition, a general-purpose application based on an attribute-based access control model is proposed that can provide trusted auditability required for data sharing and access control systems and, ultimately, a data trust framework. Besides auditing, the system presents a transparency level that both access requesters (data users) and resource owners (data controllers) can benefit from. The proposed solutions have been validated through a use case of independent digital libraries. It also provides a detailed performance analysis of the system implementation. The performance results have been compared based on different consensus mechanisms and databases, indicating the system's high throughput and low latency. Finally, this dissertation presents an end-to-end data trust framework based on blockchain technology. The proposed framework promotes data trustworthiness by assessing input datasets, effectively managing access control, and presenting data provenance and activity monitoring. A trust assessment model that examines the trustworthiness of input data sets and calculates the trust value is presented. The number of transaction validators is defined adaptively with the trust value. This research provides solutions for both data owners and data users’ by ensuring the trustworthiness and quality of the data at origin and transparent and secure usage of the data at the end. A comprehensive experimental study indicates the presented system effectively handles a large number of transactions with low latency

Measuring the impact of blockchain on healthcare applications

Blockchain is a technology with potential for making ground breaking steps in addressing social, economic and healthcare challenges. The global information technology scene is being overcrowded with blockchain applications with special focus on the vast healthcare market [12]. The value of information related to healthcare creates a clear path for applying blockchain as a solution for some of the challenges in the healthcare sector, in particular with the goal of creating a fair and transparent way for sharing information and patient data. It is however a fact that while blockchain technology introduces additional complexity to the implementation healthcare software, the benefit the technology actually brings still remains unclear and difficult to evaluate. This vision paper demonstrates our research focus on providing a body of knowledge and tools to help evaluate this impact of blockchain on eHealth applications. In particular, we identify that such a research effort has to explicitly consider cost of addressing challenges inherent to the eHealth domain like integration of disparate software systems (hospitals, research institutions, government agencies, health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, etc.), the potential introduction of cryptocurrencies in healthcare systems, degree of patient service improvement, transparency and compliance to laws and regulations, and others. The more traditional influencing factors, like cost of development and running, licenses for using third-party software services, and the ones inherent to blockchain like cost of computation and energy will also have to be taken into consideration in the metrics model.</p

BPDST: Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing on Thin Client for Electronic Medical Records

Sharing medical data can improve the quality of medical services and reduce costs. However, the current Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are scattered and easily tampered with, which is not conducive to the sharing of EMRs and is not compatible with thin clients. Fortunately, blockchain technology is tamper-proof, decentralized, auditable, and meets the above requirements. To solve these problems, we first propose Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing on Thin-Client for Electronic Medical Records (BPDST) approach that combines the k-anonymity and cloud storage, which thin clients can run like a full-node user and safeguard user\u27s EMRs privacy concurrently. Using this approach, patients can control their own EMRs, while the consortium blockchain is responsible for the transaction process and sending the correct results to the patients. BPDST can also share information without leaking or tampering with EMRs\u27 privacy, achieving the purpose of sharing medical data and privacy protection. In the medical field, this study can effectively protect users\u27 privacy when sharing medical data to provide convenience for users and break the "island" phenomenon among various medical institutions. Security analysis and extensive experiments show that BPDST is secure and practical for sharing EMRs