Patient-Aware Information-Hiding Mechanism for a Blockchain-Based Electronic Health Record System

Electronic health records are created within medical institutions and are scattered in many places, creating discontinuities in patients' medical histories. In addition, the medical institution is the party that manages health data and access. Data management by a single institution cannot ensure data integrity since there is no other data source for verification. Hence, the current medical system cannot provide a complete medical history integrated with other medical institutions. On the other hand, data privacy and security rely on the trust of medical institutions, where it is possible that data engineers of the institution might see the content of patients' private medical data. Therefore, we propose a patient-aware information-hiding mechanism for a blockchainbased electronic health records (EHR) system to help patients manage their health data, ensuring patient treatment and referral data continuity. A blockchain information-hiding mechanism is also proposed to improve data security and prevent privacy leakage. Our performance results and comparisons with related work demonstrate that our system ensures data privacy, integrity, efficiency, secure authorization, and contribution to healthcare organizations.