Secure and interoperable electronic health record exchange using blockchain and ECDHE-based access control

Abstract

Electronic health records (EHRs) act as comprehensive records of health related transactions and essential resources of data in the healthcare sector. However, the integrity and security problems of EHR continue to be inflexible. The architecture of blockchain-enabled EHR addresses the issues of integrity efficiently. This paper developed the decentralized patient centric healthcare data management (PCHDM) system using blockchain enabled EHR architecture for addressing problems with access control, record privacy and data confidentiality. This framework places the patient at the control center, ensuring secure storage of EHR records and obtaining efficient data management through the integration of blockchain and interplanetary file system (IPFS). To prevent access by unauthorized users, the proposed elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman ephemeral (ECDHE) mechanism incorporates smart contract-enabled access control for managing EHR transactions and enforcing access strategies. This architecture incorporates hyperledger fabric endorsement policies (HFRP) to address scalability problems while preserving patient privacy and securing medical data. The developed method secures the EHR data and facilitates the data exchange across heterogeneous healthcare platforms, ensuring standard communication among different EHR systems. The architecture is assessed with parameters of time for block creation, the computational overhead of transaction with encryption key size and EHR upload and download time.