Inter-hospital secure healthcare data exchange process by using proxy re-encryption and blockchain technology

The secure exchange of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) between hospitals is crucial for safeguarding the security of healthcare data and ensuring its integrity. However, existing systems struggle with maintaining strong security, scalability, transparency, and authenticity due to the presence of numerous malicious users and attackers over the internet. The proposed method addresses these issues by integrating blockchain technology, Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS), and proxy re-encryption to ensure data security during inter-hospital exchanges. Here, proxy re-encryption enables secure and efficient data sharing between users without revealing the original data. In the proposed method, encrypted EMRs are stored in a decentralized and efficient way using the IPFS. Here, the IPFS enables the storage of large EMRs, avoiding the blockchain's data storage limitations, and the blockchain network is used primarily to serve as a secure and immutable ledger for storing the hash returned from the IPFS. This ensures transparency and accountability of patient healthcare records. The proposed scheme is rigorously evaluated through experiments measuring key performance metrics, such as computation cost, time for key generation, encryption, and decryption processes, deployment cost, latency, and throughput. The security and performance analyses confirm that the proposed scheme offers superior efficiency and stronger security compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.