Blockchain-based Access Control Mechanism for Patient Data Security in Telemedicine Systems

With the significant advancement and evolution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the healthcare industry has witnessed a rapid transformation from traditional hospitals to patient-centric hospitals in which the telemedicine paradigm is adopted to facilitate remote monitoring of patients efficiently without any delay. However, telemedicine data acquired through modernized healthcare can be exploited to the various data leakage, privacy, and security challenges. For that, some of the researchers adopted the public blockchain network in telemedicine, but it does not guarantee security and privacy to that extent due to its high immutability and transparency. Therefore, we develop a proposed system using a Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain network. We also proposed an access control mechanism to restrict patient's EHR data and improve the data privacy of the proposed system. We have designed a chaincode to interact with the permissioned blockchain network. It helps to save and access EHR data from the blockchain network. The Proposed system also designs rules for every participant of the blockchain network using Permission.acl file that considers different rules for different participants with the specification of operation, resource, and actions. Finally, the performance of the proposed system by integrating Hyperledger Caliper is evaluated in terms of transactions per second for doctor and patient access control policies.