Secure Sharing Architecture of Personal Healthcare Data Using Private Permissioned Blockchain for Telemedicine

Blockchain technology has fascinated and significantly sparked research activities and industries due to its transparency in transactions and data sharing. The striking proliferation of blockchain technology is used to confront the challenges associated with trust, transparency, security, centralization, supply chain traceability, and regulatory compliance. The promising technology has the potential to enable several boons across diverse fields like healthcare, supply chain management, manufacturing, cross-border payments, finance, and energy trading. Telemedicine primarily aims to facilitate the transmission of healthcare data through electronic channels, enabling users to access medical services. It supports healthcare services around the globe, aids in early diagnosis and treatment, and assists with remote care by provisioning effective healthcare that is safe, secure, and reliable. However, there are challenges associated with Personal Health Records (PHR) due to lack of ownership of the data, accuracy, reliability, and data transaction security. The architecture presented in this work enables us to benefit from telemedicine and securely share PHR. The proposed model offers a permissioned network-based Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework for secure PHR sharing amongst healthcare providers. The Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus mechanism protects patient privacy, and the IPFS protocol is used to store the data off-chain. Additionally, the smart contract is utilized for providing patients with granular access control over PHR data. Hyperledger Caliper is used as a benchmarking tool to test this technology and determine the average latency rate for viewing and updating the PHR by healthcare providers along with analysis of CPU and memory utilization. As a result, our goals in telemedicine to improve secure sharing and give the patient access control are achieved.