A Review of Secure and Privacy-Preserving Medical Data Sharing

Hao Jin, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Yan Luo, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Peilong Li, Elizabethtown College
Jomol Mathew, University of Massachusetts Medical School

Abstract

In the digital healthcare era, it is of the utmost importance to harness medical information scattered across healthcare institutions to support in-depth data analysis and achieve personalized healthcare. However, the cyberinfrastructure boundaries of healthcare organizations and privacy leakage threats place obstacles on the sharing of medical records. Blockchain, as a public ledger characterized by its transparency, tamper-evidence, trustlessness, and decentralization, can help build a secure medical data exchange network. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art schemes on secure and privacy-preserving medical data sharing of the past decade with a focus on blockchain-based approaches. We classify them into permissionlessblockchain-based approaches and permissioned blockchain-based approaches and analyze their advantagesand disadvantages. We also discuss potential research topics on blockchain-based medical data sharing.