Healthchain: A Blockchain-Based Privacy Preserving Scheme for Large-Scale Health Data

TLDR

The rapid deployment of IoT for remote health monitoring has led to centralized storage of sensitive data, causing users to lose control, exposing privacy risks, and creating single‑point bottlenecks. This work introduces Healthchain, a blockchain‑based scheme that encrypts health data and enables fine‑grained access control to protect privacy at scale. Healthchain allows users to revoke or grant doctor access through key‑management transactions and ensures that IoT data and diagnoses are immutable, preventing tampering and medical disputes. Security analysis and experiments demonstrate that Healthchain is viable for smart healthcare systems.

Abstract

With the dramatically increasing deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT), remote monitoring of health data to achieve intelligent healthcare has received great attention recently. However, due to the limited computing power and storage capacity of IoT devices, users' health data are generally stored in a centralized third party, such as the hospital database or cloud, and make users lose control of their health data, which can easily result in privacy leakage and single-point bottleneck. In this paper, we propose Healthchain, a large-scale health data privacy preserving scheme based on blockchain technology, where health data are encrypted to conduct fine-grained access control. Specifically, users can effectively revoke or add authorized doctors by leveraging user transactions for key management. Furthermore, by introducing Healthchain, both IoT data and doctor diagnosis cannot be deleted or tampered with so as to avoid medical disputes. Security analysis and experimental results show that the proposed Healthchain is applicable for smart healthcare system.