Permissioned blockchain approach using open data in healthcare

Digital health records play a key role in the area. However, it is difficult to obtain a unified view of your data, as it is distributed among different providers, spread over several places, and is not integrated. To address these problems, blockchain technology and the openEHR interoperability standard have emerged. Blockchain is a new wave of disruption that has come to redesign interactions that involve any form of exchange of values, with the potential to improve healthcare, bringing a new perspective on security, resilience, and effectiveness of systems. In turn, with the use of openEHR, the standardization of electronic records is guaranteed, offering fine-grained access permissions for stakeholders. In addition to the use of archetypes as a reference to make the templates, where they are integrated to build a module with compatible standards. Based on an open data framework, OpenEHR, and blockchain technology, this paper has conceptualised a proposed two architectures that will be implemented within a Portuguese hospital, at the ICU, to increase and provide support for clinical decision-making, ensuring interoperability between systems, as well as the veracity, privacy and security of the data being used.FCT -Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(DSAPI A/DS/0084/2018

Holistic Blockchain Approach to Foster Trust, Privacy and Security in IoT Based Ambient Assisted Living Environment

The application of blockchains techniques in the Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining much attention with new solutions proposed in diverse areas of the IoT. Conventionally IoT systems are designed to follow the centralised paradigm where security and privacy control is vested on a 'trusted' third-party. This design leaves the user at the mercy of a sovereign broker and in addition, susceptible to several attacks. The implicit trust and the inferred reliability of centralised systems have been challenged recently following several privacy violations and personal data breaches. Consequently, there is a call for more secure decentralised systems that allows for finer control of user privacy while providing secure communication. Propitiously, the blockchain holds much promise and may provide the necessary framework for the design of a secure IoT system that guarantees fine-grained user privacy in a trustless manner. In this paper, we propose a holistic blockchain-based decentralised model for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environment. The nodes in our proposed model utilize smart contracts to define interaction rules while working collaboratively to contribute storage and computing resources. Based on the blockchain technique, our proposed model promotes trustless interaction and enhanced user's privacy through the blockchain-Interplanetary File System (IPFS) alliance. The proposed model also addresses the shortfall of storage constraints exhibited in many IoT systems

The health care sector’s experience of blockchain:a cross-disciplinary investigation of its real transformative potential

Background:Academic literature highlights blockchain’s potential to transform health care, particularly by seamlessly and securely integrating existing data silos while enabling patients to exercise automated, fine-grained control over access to their electronic health records. However, no serious scholarly attempt has been made to assess how these technologies have in fact been applied to real-world health care contexts.Objective:The primary aim of this paper is to assess whether blockchain’s theoretical potential to deliver transformative benefits to health care is likely to become a reality by undertaking a critical investigation of the health care sector’s actual experience of blockchain technologies to date.Methods:This mixed methods study entailed a series of iterative, in-depth, theoretically oriented, desk-based investigations and 2 focus group investigations. It builds on the findings of a companion research study documenting real-world engagement with blockchain technologies in health care. Data were sourced from academic and gray literature from multiple disciplinary perspectives concerned with the configuration, design, and functionality of blockchain technologies. The analysis proceeded in 3 stages. First, it undertook a qualitative investigation of observed patterns of blockchain for health care engagement to identify the application domains, data-sharing problems, and the challenges encountered to date. Second, it critically compared these experiences with claims about blockchain’s potential benefits in health care. Third, it developed a theoretical account of challenges that arise in implementing blockchain in health care contexts, thus providing a firmer foundation for appraising its future prospects in health care.Results:Health care organizations have actively experimented with blockchain technologies since 2016 and have demonstrated proof of concept for several applications (use cases) primarily concerned with administrative data and to facilitate medical research by enabling algorithmic models to be trained on multiple disparately located sets of patient data in a secure, privacy-preserving manner. However, blockchain technology is yet to be implemented at scale in health care, remaining largely in its infancy. These early experiences have demonstrated blockchain’s potential to generate meaningful value to health care by facilitating data sharing between organizations in circumstances where computational trust can overcome a lack of social trust that might otherwise prevent valuable cooperation. Although there are genuine prospects of using blockchain to bring about positive transformations in health care, the successful development of blockchain for health care applications faces a number of very significant, multidimensional, and highly complex challenges. Early experience suggests that blockchain is unlikely to rapidly and radically revolutionize health care.Conclusions:The successful development of blockchain for health care applications faces numerous significant, multidimensional, and complex challenges that will not be easily overcome, suggesting that blockchain technologies are unlikely to revolutionize health care in the near future

Cloud Storage Systems with Secure Attribute-Based Access Control

This research presents a novel approach to safe access procedure in cloud storage structure by addressing the challenges associated with managing and distributing complex secret keys. The proposed procedure utilizes attribute-based access control and incorporates a client process, an authentication terminal process, and a storage terminal process. The client generates a main secret key and public parameters for each user using an attribute password mechanism. The authentication terminal maintains user attribute, file attribute, and attribute secret key databases. Access control is determined by constructing an access control string from the attributes of the user, file, and file operation type, enabling fine-grained access control and accommodating large-scale user dynamic expansion. Consequently, the access control costs of the cloud storage structure are significantly reduced, while offering a flexible, effective, and secure access control mechanism for safe storage structure access

Deep Learning meets Blockchain for Automated and Secure Access Control

Access control is a critical component of computer security, governing access to system resources. However, designing policies and roles in traditional access control can be challenging and difficult to maintain in dynamic and complex systems, which is particularly problematic for organizations with numerous resources. Furthermore, traditional methods suffer from issues such as third-party involvement, inefficiency, and privacy gaps, making transparent and dynamic access control an ongoing research problem. Moreover detecting malicious activities and identifying users who are not behaving appropriately can present notable difficulties. To address these challenges, we propose DLACB, a Deep Learning Based Access Control Using Blockchain, as a solution to decentralized access control. DLACB uses blockchain to provide transparency, traceability, and reliability in various domains such as medicine, finance, and government while taking advantage of deep learning to not rely on predefined policies and eventually automate access control. With the integration of blockchain and deep learning for access control, DLACB can provide a general framework applicable to various domains, enabling transparent and reliable logging of all transactions. As all data is recorded on the blockchain, we have the capability to identify malicious activities. We store a list of malicious activities in the storage system and employ a verification algorithm to cross-reference it with the blockchain. We conduct measurements and comparisons of the smart contract processing time for the deployed access control system in contrast to traditional access control methods, determining the time overhead involved. The processing time of DLBAC demonstrates remarkable stability when exposed to increased request volumes.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2303.1475

Perspective Chapter Integrating Large Language Models and Blockchain in Telemedicine

This perspective paper examines how combining artificial intelligence in the form of large language models (LLMs) with blockchain technology can potentially solve ongoing issues in telemedicine, such as personalized care, system integration, and secure patient data sharing. The strategic integration of LLMs for swift medical data analysis and decentralized blockchain ledgers for secure data exchange across organizations could establish a vital learning loop essential for advanced telemedicine. Although the value of combining LLMs with blockchain technology has been demonstrated in non-healthcare fields, wider adoption in medicine requires careful attention to reliability, safety measures, and prioritizing access to ensure ethical use for enhancing patient outcomes. The perspective article posits that a thoughtful convergence could facilitate comprehensive improvements in telemedicine, including automated triage, improved subspecialist access to records, coordinated interventions, readily available diagnostic test results, and secure remote patient monitoring. This article looks at the latest uses of LLMs and blockchain in telemedicine, explores potential synergies, discusses risks and how to manage them, and suggests ways to use these technologies responsibly to improve care quality

HealthBlock: A Blockchain-IoT Fusion for Secure Healthcare Data Exchange

Managing healthcare data while ensuring its security and privacy is critical to providing quality care to patients. However, traditional approaches to healthcare data sharing have limitations, including the risk of data breaches and the lack of privacy-preserving mechanisms. This research paper proposes a novel hybrid blockchain-IoT approach for privacy-preserving healthcare data sharing that addresses these challenges. Our system incorporates a private blockchain for protected and tamper-proof data sharing, with privacy-preserving techniques such as differential privacy and homomorphic encryption to protect patient data. IoT devices are utilized to collect and transmit real-time data, equipped with privacy-preserving mechanisms such as data anonymization and secure transmission protocols. Our approach achieved an accuracy rate of 98% for access control and a 99.6% success rate for data privacy protection. Furthermore, our proposed system demonstrated improved data storage and retrieval performance, with a data storage overhead reduction of up to 86% and a data retrieval time reduction of up to 81%. These results indicate the potential of our approach to enhance the security, privacy, and efficiency of healthcare data management, contributing to improved patient care outcomes

FHIRChain: Applying Blockchain to Securely and Scalably Share Clinical Data

Secure and scalable data sharing is essential for collaborative clinical decision making. Conventional clinical data efforts are often siloed, however, which creates barriers to efficient information exchange and impedes effective treatment decision made for patients. This paper provides four contributions to the study of applying blockchain technology to clinical data sharing in the context of technical requirements defined in the "Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap" from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). First, we analyze the ONC requirements and their implications for blockchain-based systems. Second, we present FHIRChain, which is a blockchain-based architecture designed to meet ONC requirements by encapsulating the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard for shared clinical data. Third, we demonstrate a FHIRChain-based decentralized app using digital health identities to authenticate participants in a case study of collaborative decision making for remote cancer care. Fourth, we highlight key lessons learned from our case study

Blockchain Driven Access Control Mechanisms, Models and Frameworks: A Systematic Literature Review

Access control or authorization is referred to as the confinement of specific actions of an entity, thereby allowing them to be performed as per certain rules. Blockchain-driven access control mechanisms gained considerable attention directly after applications beyond the premise of cryptocurrency were found. However, there are no systematic efforts to analyze existing empirical evidence. To this end, we aim to synthesize litera- ture to understand the state-of-the-art blockchain driven access control mechanisms with respect to underlying platforms, utilized blockchain properties, nature of the mod- els and associated testbeds and tools. We conducted the review in a systematic way. Meta analysis and thematic synthesis were performed on the findings from relevant primary studies, in order to answer the framed research questions in perspective. We identified 76 relevant primary studies that passed the quality assessment.  The problems targeted by relevant studies were single point of failure, security, and privacy, etc. The meta-analysis of the primary studies suggests the use of different blockchain platforms along with several application domains where different blockchain proprieties were utilized. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of blockchain driven access control systems. In hindsight, we present a taxonomy of blockchain-driven access control systems to better understand the immense implications of this field spanning various application domain

Internet of Thing Based Confidential Healthcare Data Storage, Access Control and Monitoring Using Blockchain Technique

Internet of Things plays a significant role in multiple sectors like agriculture, manufacturing and healthcare for collecting information to automation. The collected information is in different diversity and consists of confidential and non-confidential information. Secure handling of confidential data is a crucial task in cloud computing like storage, access control and monitoring. The blockchain based storage technique provides immutable data storage, efficient access control and dynamic monitoring to confidential data. Thus, the secure internet of things data storage, access control and monitoring using blockchain technique is proposed in this work. The patients health information that are in different formats are pruned by a decision tree algorithm and it classifies the confidential data and non-confidential data by the fuzzy rule classification technique. Depending on data owner's willing, the fuzzy rule is framed and the confidential and non-confidential data collected by internet of things sensors are classified. To provide confidentiality to confidential data, Attribute Based Encryption is applied to confidential data and stored in an off-chain mode of blockchain instead of entire data encryption and storage. The non-confidential data is stored in a plaintext form in cloud storage. When compared to support vector machine, K-nearest neighbor and Naive Bayes classification techniques, the proposed fuzzy rule based confidential data identification produces greater than 96 % of accuracy based on data owner willing and confidential data storage takes lesser than 20 % of storage space and processing time in an entire data storage. Additionally, the blockchain performances like throughput, network scalability and latency is optimized through minimal block size and transactions. Thus, our experimental results show that the proposed blockchain based internet of things data storage, access control and monitoring technique provides better confidentiality and access control to confidential data than the conventional cloud storage technique with lesser processing time