A blockchain based patient centric E health system ensuring security and privacy with modified Merkle Tree

Abstract

The main objective of this research work is to propose a Blockchain newlinebased Patient Centric e-Health System that ensures data storage security. This newlinethesis argues that the traditional database systems, conventional security newlinemechanisms and legacy access control policies are insufficient in maintaining newlineinteroperability, privacy and security of healthcare systems. The proposed newlineBlockchain based patient centric e-Health system strongly ensures security newlineand privacy through the properties of Blockchain such as immutability, newlinetransparency, data provenance and authentication. Applying Blockchain newlinetechnology in healthcare systems is a recent technological development and newlinehence Blockchain technology is a revolutionary solution for replacing the newlineexisting third party techniques and plays a vital role in Electronic Health newlineRecord (EHR) management. It is demonstrated that the proposed Blockchain newlinebased e-Health system achieves security, privacy and interoperability. newlineThis thesis is divided into four parts. The first part of the research work newlineproposes a Modified Merkle Tree (MMT) Data Structure for ensuring the newlineintegrity of health data in Blockchain based e-Health Systems. Due to newlineadvances in digital technology and storage media, the security of stored data newlinewith integrity management, especially in a distributed environment is a newlinecritical challenge in the present era. This essentially forces to design of a newlineproper data structure. Merkle Tree is one such solution that finds wide use in newlineBlockchain and financial management. Since the existing Binary Merkle Tree newlinegenerates a narrow span tree structure, it consumes more time to build and newlinevalidate the tree than traversing the tree. Hence, a simple, at the same time newlineeffective, constant degree, 3-stage Modified Merkle Tree that ensures data newlinestorage security with integrity management is proposed in this research. newline