Project Title: Development of Intelligent Blockchain techniques for providing efficient management and storage security solutions for E-healthcare.
Grant No.: BT/AGCJC0094/01/22
Investigators: Dr. Shamama Anwar (PI), Dr. Prashant Pranav (Co-PI), Dr. Sandip Dutta (Co-PI)
Sanction Amount: ₹ 10,00,000/-
Duration: 8 months (08-May-2023 to 23-Feb-2024)
Summary: In the present scenario, there is a lack of privacy, security, and poor management of patient records in the Electronic Health Records EHRs system due to the scattered form of patient records stored in different medical institutions database servers. There is a requirement of the latest technology which handles the present situation of EHR in a systematic way. The proposal intends to utilize blockchain innovation in the clinical field to keep these personal EHR safe and available to the practitioners, patients, health workers, insurance agents and so forth stakeholders. On-the-go availability of this data would expedite emergency diagnosis even remotely at situations when a patient is not carrying his/her medical records. Blockchains are a better mechanism to indefinitely store ever-growing patient medical records because it has the capacity to develop and change significantly all through its lifetime by adding new members and changing hierarchical connections, which is very likely to happen in the healthcare-based system. The aim of such a framework is expected to arrange the patients’ clinical datasets and characterize conventions for guaranteeing the consistency of the health care related data. These are normally committed to normalizing the capacity of data storage and managing clinical and segment information about patients. Although such a system exists, the main issues identified through literature survey yield these potential issues:
- Identity Management: Maintaining the ownership of the data is a vital issue when it comes to data storage in a blockchain based system. In case of centralized storage or trusted third party storage the full ownership of the data is compromised and hence a secure distributed data storage is required maintaining proper authorization protocols.
- Access delay: As discussed priorly, centralized implementation may cause authorization and data retrieval delay. Since medical data retrieval is real-time and may often be critical, access latency plays an important role in the blockchain system design. The access delay increases when the data storage is outsourced on a centralized cloud storage.
- Security against attacks: PoW-based blockchains are vulnerable if a single miner hashing power accounts for more than 50 of the total hashing power. Such cases may lead to easy tampering of the block content and hence, is a privacy concern. Other issues include protection of the key pair against attacks and the vulnerability of the blockchain against common attacks like selfish mining attack, DOA attack, etc.
- Privacy of data: Security of the patient data is of utmost importance as it gathers the trust of the users of the system. Hence, there is a requirement to store the patient data in an easily retrievable format and also ensure its privacy.
- Blockchain Scalability: Scalability is an important component of e-healthcare as it is ever growing with an increasing number of patient and healthcare services each day. Scalability should also ensure that there is not much increase in the latency of the system and the performance should not be compromised while dealing with the expansion of the data.