TY - JOUR
T1 - The case of HyperLedger Fabric as a blockchain solution for healthcare applications
AU - Antwi, McSeth
AU - Adnane, Asma
AU - Ahmad, Farhan
AU - Hussain, Rasheed
AU - Habib ur Rehman, Muhammad
AU - Kerrache, Chaker Abdelaziz
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors
PY - 2021/3/1
Y1 - 2021/3/1
N2 - The healthcare industry deals with highly sensitive data which must be managed in a secure way. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold various kinds of personal and sensitive data which contain names, addresses, social security numbers, insurance numbers, and medical history. Such personal data is valuable to the patients, healthcare service providers, medical insurance companies, and research institutions. However, the public release of this highly sensitive personal data poses serious privacy and security threats to patients and healthcare service providers. Hence, we foresee the requirement of new technologies to address the privacy and security challenges for personal data in healthcare applications. Blockchain is one of the promising solutions, aimed to provide transparency, security, and privacy using consensus-driven decentralised data management on top of peer-to-peer distributed computing systems. Therefore, to solve the mentioned problems in healthcare applications, in this paper, we investigate the use of private blockchain technologies to assess their feasibility for healthcare applications. We create testing scenarios using HyperLedger Fabric to explore different criteria and use-cases for healthcare applications. Additionally, we thoroughly evaluate the representative test case scenarios to assess the blockchain-enabled security criteria in terms of data confidentiality, privacy and access control. The experimental evaluation reveals the promising benefits of private blockchain technologies in terms of security, regulation compliance, compatibility, flexibility, and scalability.
AB - The healthcare industry deals with highly sensitive data which must be managed in a secure way. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold various kinds of personal and sensitive data which contain names, addresses, social security numbers, insurance numbers, and medical history. Such personal data is valuable to the patients, healthcare service providers, medical insurance companies, and research institutions. However, the public release of this highly sensitive personal data poses serious privacy and security threats to patients and healthcare service providers. Hence, we foresee the requirement of new technologies to address the privacy and security challenges for personal data in healthcare applications. Blockchain is one of the promising solutions, aimed to provide transparency, security, and privacy using consensus-driven decentralised data management on top of peer-to-peer distributed computing systems. Therefore, to solve the mentioned problems in healthcare applications, in this paper, we investigate the use of private blockchain technologies to assess their feasibility for healthcare applications. We create testing scenarios using HyperLedger Fabric to explore different criteria and use-cases for healthcare applications. Additionally, we thoroughly evaluate the representative test case scenarios to assess the blockchain-enabled security criteria in terms of data confidentiality, privacy and access control. The experimental evaluation reveals the promising benefits of private blockchain technologies in terms of security, regulation compliance, compatibility, flexibility, and scalability.
KW - Blockchain
KW - Electronic healthcare records
KW - Feasibility study
KW - Healthcare
KW - Privacy
KW - Security
KW - Use-case
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85124547632&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.bcra.2021.100012
DO - 10.1016/j.bcra.2021.100012
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85124547632
VL - 2
JO - Blockchain: Research and Applications
JF - Blockchain: Research and Applications
SN - 2096-7209
IS - 1
M1 - 100012
ER -