SmartMedChain: A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Smart Healthcare Framework

Nowadays, the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technology worldwide is accelerating the digital transformation of healthcare industry. In this context, smart healthcare (s-healthcare) solutions are ensuring better and innovative opportunities for healthcare providers to improve patients’ care. However, these solutions raise also new challenges in terms of security and privacy due to the diversity of stakeholders, the centralized data management, and the resulting lack of trustworthiness, accountability, and control. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Blockchain-based and privacy-preserving framework called SmartMedChain for data sharing in s-healthcare environment. The Blockchain is built on Hyperledger Fabric and stores encrypted health data by using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a distributed data storage solution with high resiliency and scalability. Indeed, compared to other propositions and based on the concept of smart contracts, our solution combines both data access control and data usage auditing measures for both Medical IoT data and Electronic Health Records (EHRs) generated by s-healthcare services. In addition, s-healthcare stakeholders can be held accountable by introducing an innovative Privacy Agreement Management scheme that monitors the execution of the service in respect of patient preferences and in accordance with relevant privacy laws. Security analysis and experimental results show that the proposed SmartMedChain is feasible and efficient for s-healthcare environments. Copyright © 2021 Driss El Majdoubi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.