Protecting the integrity and confidentiality of healthcare data with blockchain-enabled secure and scalable access...

ObjectiveThis research work is designed to solve the problem of patient-centric control, security, and transparency of the healthcare data management. The suggested framework will not only improve patient privacy but also guarantee the data sharing process is in accordance with the regulatory standards.MethodsThe access controls are implemented in the form of programmable smart contracts. Real-life healthcare datasets are evaluated empirically, under varying load conditions, in order to evaluate the system performance characteristics.ResultsBased on the encryption benchmark findings, AES-128 exhibited the least overhead (encryption: 1.3 ms, decryption: 1.1 ms, key generation: 2.1 ms), followed by AES-256 (1.9 ms/1.6 ms/2.9 ms), with RSA-1024 trailing behind as the highest overhead at 2.6 ms, 2.3 ms, and 4.1 ms respectively. Additionally, private and consortium blockchains surpassed public ones in terms of throughput (1,000 TPS and 800 TPS) and latency. In terms of integrity validation, the findings indicated that the Merkle Tree approach was the most efficient (hashing: 0.4 ms, verification: 0.9 ms, energy: 8 mJ).ConclusionThe results show that the combination of cryptographic protection, scalable storage, and blockchain-based access control is a viable and secure solution to healthcare data management.