Towards secure and privacy-preserving data sharing in e-Health systems via consortium blockchain
Abstract
Electronic health record sharing can help to improve the accuracy of diagnosis, where security and privacy preservation are critical issues in the systems. In recent years, blockchain has been proposed to be a promising solution to achieve personal health information (PHI) sharing with security and privacy preservation due to its advantages of immutability. This work proposes a blockchain-based secure and privacy-preserving PHI sharing (BSPP) scheme for diagnosis improvements in e-Health systems. Firstly, two kinds of blockchains, private blockchain and consortium blockchain, are constructed by devising their data structures, and consensus mechanisms. The private blockchain is responsible for storing the PHI while the consortium blockchain keeps records of the secure indexes of the PHI. In order to achieve data security, access control, privacy preservation and secure search, all the data including the PHI, keywords and the patients' identity are public key encrypted with keyword search. Furthermore, the block generators are required to provide proof of conformance for adding new blocks to the blockchains, which guarantees the system availability. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol can meet with the security goals. Furthermor, we implement the proposed scheme on JUICE to evaluate the performance.
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The use of such technologies is assisting researchers in building blockchain-based frameworks with predictive capabilities to improve medical informatics and diagnostics.
“The use of such technologies is assisting researchers in building blockchain-based frameworks with the predictive capabilities to improve medical informatics (Lee et al., 2018) as well as diagnostics (Lee et al., 2018;Zhang & Lin, 2018).”
From Blockchain in healthcare: A systematic literature review, synthesizing framework and future research agenda (2020) · cites this paper as Zhang & Lin, 2018
Few reviewed studies acknowledged the need for regulatory compliance or standards and goals for compliance requirements.
“Our review suggests that few studies have acknowledged the need for regulatory compliance (Yue et al., 2016) or even the standards and goals for compliance requirements (Zhang & Lin, 2018;Al Omar et al., 2019;Li et al., 2019).”
From Blockchain in healthcare: A systematic literature review, synthesizing framework and future research agenda (2020) · cites this paper as Zhang & Lin, 2018
Prior studies implied that certain aspects of architectural frameworks for blockchain in healthcare can affect performance efficiency.
“Studies have implied that certain aspects of architectural frameworks developed for adoption of blockchain in healthcare can affect the performance efficiency of the proposed framework (Ji et al., 2018;Mamoshina et al., 2018;Zhang & Lin, 2018).”
From Blockchain in healthcare: A systematic literature review, synthesizing framework and future research agenda (2020) · cites this paper as Zhang & Lin, 2018
Conventional privacy-preserving transformations often reduce utility in ways that matter clinically, especially when correlations or temporal patterns drive prediction.
“On the other hand, conventional privacy-preserving transformations often reduce utility in ways that matter clinically, especially when correlations or temporal patterns drive prediction (Zhang and Lin, 2018; Rieke et al., 2020; Kaissis et al., 2020).”
From CITADEL: a post-quantum secure blockchain framework for privacy-preserving electronic health records with temporally-partitioned federated learning (2026) · cites this paper as Zhang and Lin, 2018
Four publications proposed to use blockchain for building a personal health record system that could bridge the gap between the patient and institution-specific EHRs.
“Four publications [25,27,28,48] proposed to use blockchain for building a personal health record system that could bridge the gap between the patient and institutionspecific EHRs.”
From Blockchain in healthcare and health sciences—A scoping review (2020) · cites this paper as [28]
Most state-of-the-art approaches to medical data sharing store medical information off-chain while storing data query strings and hash values on-chain for authenticity and integrity verification.
“This explains why most of the state-of-the-art approaches [47], [48], [50]- [52], [55] on medical data sharing chose to store medical information off-chain while data query strings and hash values are stored on-chain for authenticity and integrity verification.”
From A review of secure and privacy-preserving medical data sharing (2019) · cites this paper as [47]
Most existing schemes choose to store encrypted metadata (e.g., query strings and secure indices) indicating data locations on chain.
“Most existing schemes choose to store encrypted metadata (e.g., query strings in [47], [48] and secure indices in [53], [57]) indicating data locations on chain.”
From A review of secure and privacy-preserving medical data sharing (2019) · cites this paper as [47]
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“On the other hand, conventional privacy-preserving transformations often reduce utility in ways that matter clinically, especially when correlations or temporal patterns drive prediction (Zhang and Lin, 2018; Rieke et al., 2020; Kaissis et al., 2020).”
- Authors
- Zhang, A., & Lin, X.
- Affiliations
- Anhui Normal University (CN)
- Wilfrid Laurier University (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Zhang, Aiqing
- Venue
- Journal of Medical Systems
- Published
- 2018-06-28
- Volume
- 42
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 140-140
- ISSN
- 0148-5598 (ISSN-L)
- 1573-689X
- OpenAlex
- W2811112224
- Cited by
- 606
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2026: 19 · 2025: 57 · 2024: 63 · 2023: 126 · 2022: 114 · 2021: 105 · 2020: 67 · 2019: 50 · 2018: 5
- FWCI
- 91.33
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Journal of Medical Systems (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61601005)
- Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (1608085QF138, 1808085MF164)
- Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Network and Information Security (AHNIS2018003)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology in Education and Learning
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Electronic Health Records Systems
- Keywords
- electronic health records, consortium blockchain, private blockchain, privacy preservation, secure search, keyword search, access control, public-key encryption, consensus algorithms, e-health security
- MeSH terms
- Confidentiality, Humans, Computer Security, Telemedicine, Privacy, Information Dissemination, Electronic Health Records
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