• 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

• 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?

• To conduct medical research, data sharing is essential between different medical institutions.
• Access to medical data can help government agencies take correct decisions about public health.

Medical Data Sharing can boost R&D

• 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.

• 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

• However medical data is too sensitive to share. Same is the case of IOT data.
• 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.
• 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?

• The consortium Block Chain Hyper ledger fabric is adopted to allow data users to search for encrypted medical data records.

• The smart Contract i.e., the chaincode implements attribute based access control mechanism to allow users with proper attributes to access data.
• The K-anonymity and searchable encryption ensures medical data is shared without privacy leaking.

What is K-anonymity and Searchable Encryption?

• K-anonymity - Obscures some sensitive data fields without affecting the original data.
• The accuracy of statistical results can be preserved.
• Searchable encryption allows encrypted data to be searched without knowing the content of the data.