Open Access

ARTICLE

Blockchain-Enabled EHR Framework for Internet of Medical Things

Lewis Nkenyereye^1,*, S. M. Riazul Islam², Mahmud Hossain³, M. Abdullah-Al-Wadud⁴, Atif Alamri⁴

1 Department of Computer and Information Security, Sejong University, Seoul, 05006, Korea
2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sejong University, Seoul, 05006, Korea
3 Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama, 35294, USA
4 Department of Software Engineering, King Saud University, Riyadh, 11543, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Author: Lewis Nkenyereye. Email:

(This article belongs to this Special Issue: Intelligent Decision Support Systems for Complex Healthcare Applications)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2021, 67(1), 211-221. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.013796

Received 21 August 2020; Accepted 19 October 2020; Issue published 12 January 2021

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) offers an infrastructure made of smart medical equipment and software applications for healthcare services. Through the internet, the IoMT is capable of providing remote medical diagnosis and timely health services. The patients can use their smart devices to create, store and share their electronic health records (EHR) with a variety of medical personnel including medical doctors and nurses. However, unless the underlying commination within IoMT is secured, malicious users can intercept, modify and even delete the sensitive EHR data of patients. Patients also lose full control of their EHR since most healthcare services within IoMT are constructed under a centralized platform outsourced in the cloud. Therefore, it is appealing to design a decentralized, auditable and secure EHR system that guarantees absolute access control for the patients while ensuring privacy and security. Using the features of blockchain including decentralization, auditability and immutability, we propose a secure EHR framework which is mainly maintained by the medical centers. In this framework, the patients’ EHR data are encrypted and stored in the servers of medical institutions while the corresponding hash values are kept on the blockchain. We make use of security primitives to offer authentication, integrity and confidentiality of EHR data while access control and immutability is guaranteed by the blockchain technology. The security analysis and performance evaluation of the proposed framework confirms its efficiency.

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Keywords

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