Secure Architecture for Inter-Healthcare Electronic Health Records Exchange

Abstract

The increase in cyberattacks against the healthcare system, notably Electronic Health Records (EHRs) breaches, has cost the healthcare providers more in recent years. This situation is predicted to increase in the coming years as the healthcare systems are proposing a consortium EHRs repository. Due to this reason, it is crucial to deploy solutions that can ensure the security of shared health records. More specifically, maintaining the integrity and consistency of shared EHRs becomes pertinent. In this on-going research, we propose a blockchain-based solution that facilitates a scalable and secured inter-healthcare EHRs exchange. These healthcare systems maintain their records on individual private blockchain networks, and the blockchains interact to exchange patient health history based on request. The proposed solution verifies the integrity and consistency of requests and replies from other healthcare systems. It presents them in a standard format that can be easily understood by different healthcare nodes. The verification steps guard against malicious activities on both stored and in transit EHRs from insider and outsider threat actors. We evaluate the security analysis against frequently encounter outsider and insider threats within a healthcare system. The preliminary result shows that the architecture can detect and prevent threat actors from uploading compromising EHRs into the network and prevents unauthorized retrieval of patient's information.