Health and Medical Data Collection and Sharing
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In today’s world there are wearable sensors being used
extensively by people which collect patient’s information
for monitoring and diagnosing.
Health and Medical Data Collection and Sharing
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Also health related mobile apps and devices generate large
amount of medical data which is critical for disease
research and diagnosis.
Why Medical Data Sharing is Important?
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To conduct medical research, data sharing is essential
between different medical institutions.
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Access to medical data can help government agencies take
correct decisions about public health.
Medical Data Sharing can boost R&D
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COVID-19 Epidemic scenario currently proves that efficient
medical information sharing between different institutions
can effectively trace the changes in symptoms and severity
of the disease and virus behavioral changes and mutations
which can aid in vaccine development.
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Traditionally all these data are store centrally in cloud
and all institutions access these data where privacy and
security might be an issue.
Issues with traditional cloud storage for Health data
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However medical data is too sensitive to share. Same is the
case of IOT data.
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The traditional cloud storage is centralized and the data
sharing depends on single trusted third party which suffer
from single point of failure.
How Blockchain can help in Secure Storage of Health and
Medical Data
- Block Chain manages data in decentralized manner.
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Block Chain Smart Contracts enables programmatic access to
data by participants and all interactions are authenticated
and recorded by other participants.
How Block chain ensures secure access to sensitive medical
data?
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The consortium Block Chain Hyper ledger fabric is adopted to
allow data users to search for encrypted medical data
records.
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The smart Contract i.e., the chaincode implements attribute
based access control mechanism to allow users with proper
attributes to access data.
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The K-anonymity and searchable encryption ensures medical
data is shared without privacy leaking.
What is K-anonymity and Searchable Encryption?
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K-anonymity - Obscures some sensitive data fields without
affecting the original data.
- The accuracy of statistical results can be preserved.
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Searchable encryption allows encrypted data to be searched
without knowing the content of the data.