Healthchain: Secure EMRs Management and Trading in Distributed Healthcare Service System

Abstract

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are the most critical data in human health management. As in traditional centralized healthcare service systems (HSSs), user privacy security, EMRs data leakage, tampering, and island are some significant problems. However, blockchain is a promising technology to protect the privacy and realize cross-institutional data sharing for solving these problems. In this article, a novel peer-to-peer EMRs data management and trading system called healthchain has been proposed based on consortium blockchain technology. Through this distributed system, the patient can access their EMRs in different institutions freely, and the EMRs can be traded among different users conveniently. Then, to balance EMRs data supply and demand, we establish a Stackelberg pricing model to evaluate EMRs data providers and consumers' interactions. The optimal unit price and data amounts can be found by applying the backward induction method, and the maximizing benefits of the participants can be obtained by achieving the Nash equilibrium in the proposed game. Moreover, security analysis shows the healthchain can provide secure EMRs management and trading, and the simulation results show that the proposed pricing model can help the healthchain achieve social welfare maximization.