Sdhcare: Secured Distributed Healthcare System

In the healthcare sector, the move towards Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems has been accelerating in parallel with the increased adoption of IoT and smart devices. This is driven by the anticipated advantages for patients and healthcare providers. The integration of EHR and IoT makes it highly heterogeneous in terms of devices, network standards, platforms, types of data, connectivity, etc. Additionally, it introduces security, patient and data privacy, and trust challenges. To address such challenges, this thesis proposes an architecture that combines biometric-based blockchain technology with the EHR system. More specifically, this thesis describes a mechanism that uses a patient’s fingerprint for recovery of patient’s access control on their EHRs securely without compromising their privacy and identity. A secure distributed healthcare system (SDHCARE) is proposed to uniquely identify patients, enable them to control access to, and ensure recoverable access to their EHRs that are exchanged and synchronized between distributed healthcare providers. The system takes into account the security and privacy requirements of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance, and it overcomes the challenges of using secret keys as a patient’s identity to control access to EHRs. The system used distributed architecture with two layers being local to each healthcare provider that is a member of SDHCARE, and two layers shared across all members of SDCHARE system. SDHCARE system was prototyped and implemented in order to validate its functional requirements, security requirements, and to evaluate its performance. The results indicated successful fulfillment of design requirements without significant overhead on the performance as required by healthcare environment

Clinical profile and short-term outcome of pediatric hyperleukocytic acute leukemia from a developing country

This study was conducted to determine the frequency, clinical profile, and short-term outcome of children with hyperleukocytosis at two pediatric oncology centers in Karachi. Of a total 1,045 patients, 13.97% (n=146) patients had hyperleukocytosis. Majority (61.7%, n=90) were under 10 years of age and 76% (n=146) were male. The symptom duration before diagnosis was more than 30 days in 49.3% (n=72). The median WBC count was 181 x109/L (IQR=130.45- 298.3) and extreme hyperleukocytosis (\u3e200 x109/L) was observed in 44.5% (n=65) patients. Majority (94.5%, n=138) of patients were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. One or more complications developed in 78% (n=114) of cases. Clinical and laboratory tumor lysis syndrome (TLS) was observed in 17.1% (n=25) and 39% (n=57) patients, respectively. Pulmonary and neurological complications related to leukostasis were noted in 9.5% (n=14) and 27.3% (n=40) of cases, respectively. Infectious complications occurred in 23.2% (n=34) patients. The case-specific mortality was 20.5% (n=30). No mortality was related to early complications of hyperleukocytosis

Al Qawa'idu al Muqarraratu wa al Fawa`idu al Muharraratu

495 hal.; 24 cm

Implementation of a Biometric-Based Blockchain System for Preserving Privacy, Security, and Access Control in Healthcare Records

The use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems has emerged with the continuous advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart devices. This is driven by the various advantages for both patients and healthcare providers, including timely and distant alerts, continuous control, and reduced cost, to name a few. However, while providing these advantages, various challenges involving heterogeneity, scalability, and network complexity are still open. Patient security, data privacy, and trust are also among the main challenges that need more research effort. To this end, this paper presents an implementation of a biometric-based blockchain EHR system (BBEHR), a prototype that uniquely identifies patients, enables them to control access to their EHRs, and ensures recoverable access to their EHRs. This approach overcomes the dependency on the private/public key approach used by most blockchain technologies to identify patients, which becomes more crucial in situations where a loss of the private key permanently hinders the ability to access patients’ EHRs. Our solution covers component selection, high-level implementation, and integration of subsystems, was well as the coding of a prototype to validate the mitigation of the risk of permanent loss of access to EHRs by using patients’ fingerprints. A performance analysis of BBEHR showed our system’s robustness and effectiveness in identifying patients and ensuring access control for their EHRs by using blockchain smart contracts with no additional overhead