A blockchain based security mechanism for emergency healthcare systems

Electronic health records (EHRs) play a crucial role in today's healthcare industry, these records include sensitive and private healthcare data assets which are prone to the breach of security and confidentiality. These potential data breaches may have lots of consequences such as violating patient's privacy, unauthorized access to EHR, data alteration and putting the patient's life in danger. Recently proposed EHR systems have came along with strong security features for preserving the patient's safety and security. However, there is still issues regarding access control management to Personal Health Records (PHRs). In previously presented systems patient plays the main role in controlling the access to the system. And this rises an uncertainty in emergency conditions, while the patient is incapable of issuing any access permission. In this study we suggest a new framework for maintaining medical healthcare records (MHRs) in emergency conditions by a secure and private access control architecture that is designed and employed based on a permissioned blockchain hyperledger sawtooth. Leveraging unique properties of blockchain our system manages to provide a tamper-proof and secure access to patient's medical data in a short period of time in an emergency scenario. For performance analysis the proposed architecture is implemented through hyperledger sawtooth blockchain network. The numerical results of our experiment demonstrated the feasibility and superiority of our proposed architecture in compared with the similar proposed healthcare systems concerning response time, memory consumption, throughput and overall privacy and security.