MEXchange: A Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-Based Framework for Health Information Exchange Using Ring Signature and Stealth Address

Health information exchange (HIE) refers to the integrated management and secure sharing of health information among healthcare entities. HIE improves healthcare quality and streamlines healthcare administrative work. These advantages have propelled health- care stakeholders to implement HIE. However, challenged by issues such as security, privacy, and costs, HIE is not widespread. Recent studies have suggested blockchain-based HIE for solving security and privacy issues. Unfortunately, existing blockchain-based HIE studies do not consider the privacy issues caused by analyzing senders and receivers of transactions in the blockchain. In this work, we suggest MEXchange, a novel blockchain-based privacy-preserving HIE that prevents the privacy issue by obscuring the sender and concealing receiver addresses. We propose smart contracts and workflow that use ring signature and stealth address for blockchain-based HIE. Software components and implementation of MEXchange on the Ethereum private network are discussed. We evaluate MEXchange quantitatively by measuring the transaction latency and throughput of exchanging. Also, we evaluate MEXchange qualitatively using the requirements of the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). Moreover, we proceed with threat modeling based on STRIDE. Finally, we compare MEXchange with Ancile, FHIRChain, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (IHE XDS), and MedRec. The MEXchange lowers barriers to the application of blockchain-based HIE systems by mitigating privacy and security issues among healthcare stakeholders.