Providing Security&Privacy for Health Data with Multi-tier Blockchain

The proposed blockchain protocol solves the most important concerns of healthcare systems, security&privacy, which gain more importance in post-Covid-19 era.

Dr. Ömer Melih Gül

The US and many other countries spend trillion USDs on healthcare, which is increasing faster especially in the post-Covid-19 era. Privacy and Security are considered as the most important concerns of healthcare in the IoT era. My solution deals with these problems.

The technical evolution of IoT is shifting its power, storage, and computational capabilities away from centralized cloud platforms to a decentralized IoT edge. Traditional security policies may not be effective against modification attacks, eavesdropping, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) due to the large attack surface area in IoT where devices cannot have its own ID and cannot keep their privacy and resiliency to the cyber-attacks. Blockchain can support secure, transparent, and tamperproof data and computation-intensive healthcare applications. We propose a scalable, hybrid and multi-tier blockchain architecture to support mobile and IoT blockchain applications in healthcare.

In addition, to facilitate blockchain applications in low-power mobile IoT systems, mobile edge computing (MEC) can be an auspicious option to solve consensus protocols for mobile IoT users (offloading to MEC service providers). We also investigate the economic aspects of blockchain by solving game-theoretic models to jointly maximize the profit of MEC service providers and the individual utilities of the miners under different pricing schemes.

The US and many other countries spend trillion USDs on healthcare, which is increasing faster especially in the post-Covid-19 era. Privacy and Security are considered as the most important concerns of healthcare in the IoT era. My solution deals with these problems.

My blockchain solution provides privacy to the patients in terms of electronic healthcare data and personal healthcare data. If the importance of privacy is asked to ordinary people, many of them will say that they do not need data privacy, they have no secret/hidden issues, etc.

Besides, it provides security of the supply chain of medical types of equipment, which is very crucial especially for the developing countries in the post Covid-19 era. Unless the security of the supply chain is protected, vulnerable people in developing countries may suffer from taking the required medical support in the pandemic era.

My solution deals with these security and privacy problems in the healthcare industry by both considering privacy of electronic/personal healthcare data. Therefore, patients can keep their personal records safe. Many people may think individually that they need no data privacy. They may be partly right. However, if the data privacy of millions of people is considered, then the issue becomes very serious. What if keeping the data privacy of millions of people? 

If personal health data records are captured by malicious users/organizations, then they can benefit from these health records to develop a harmful strategy for these vulnerable people, especially in the AI and big data age. Therefore, our blockchain protocol can keep the security and privacy of personal health records especially the ones belonging to vulnerable people in developing countries.

Besides, it provides security of supply chain of medical equipments, which is very crucial especially for low-income countries which have difficulty get medical help in the post-Covid-19 era. Unless the security of the supply chain is protected, vulnerable people in developing countries may suffer from taking the required medical support in the pandemic era.

We also deal with economic aspects of the edge computing services for the individual users.

The US and many other countries spend trillion USDs on healthcare, which is increasing faster especially in the post-Covid-19 era. Privacy and Security are considered as the most important concerns of healthcare in the IoT era. My solution deals with these security and privacy problems in the healthcare industry by both considering privacy of electronic/personal healthcare data and security of supply chain of medical equipments. Therefore, my solution can make a big impact in this largest industry which has trillions USD-wide economic impact. 

The transaction speed and scalability are very important for the blockchain protocols. The nonscalable ones may find application areas more difficult. Then, we can consider its security aspect against malicious attacks.

Besides, we should also consider the speed of a secure supply chain for the medical types of equipment.

We should also consider the economic impact of blockchain in healthcare by also considering mobile edge computing as a mobile (computing) service provider to the users/people.

CHALLENGE 1: One of the challenges is laws and regulations to enable EU-wide collaborating machine ecosystems based on blockchain because especially in EU, GDPR states that one must remove data. However, blockchain has immutability property, which contradicts GDPR.

I will need some advisory at this point

CHALLENGE 2: Another one of the challenges is the idea that the blockchain is infinitely scalable in regard to throughput. However, many blockchains, especially single-tier blockchain protocols, cannot be scalable unless they decrease security partially.

The proposed solution overcomes this problem by proposing a hybrid multi-tier blokchain architecture instead of the single-tier one.

I am the Region 8 Coordinator in the IEEE Computer Society (whose responsibility is to coordinate all CS professional/student chapters in IEEE Region 8-Europe, Middle East, and Africa).

• Introductions to global organizations/institutions looking to more efficiently manage their healthcare

• Legal advisors on the different laws and regulations around the privacy of healthcare record data in different cities and countries (under the different regulations, the proposed solution can be adapted to different expectations in scalability and securiy manner). 

• Speaking opportunities to increase the visibility of this solution

• Advisory for Marketing and R&D strategies