A Systematic Review of Privacy Preserving Healthcare Data Sharing on Blockchain

Abstract

Sharing the electronic health data helps to increase the accuracy of the diagnoses and to improve the quality of health services. This shared data can also be used in medical research and can reduce medical costs. However, health data are fragmented across decentralized hospitals, this prevents data sharing and puts patients’ privacy at risks. In recent years, blockchain has revealed solutions that make life easier in many areas thanks to its distributed, safe and immutable structure. There are many blockchain-based studies in the literature on providing data privacy and sharing in different areas. In some studies, blockchain has been used with technologies such as cloud computing and cryptology. In the field of healthcare blockchain-based solutions are offered for the management and sharing of Electronic health records. In these solutions, private and consortium blockchain types are generally preferred and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and encryption are used for data privacy. Within the scope of this study, blockchain-based studies on the privacy preserving data sharing of health data were examined. In this paper, information about the studies in the literature and potential issues that can be studied in the future were discussed. In addition, information about current blockchain technologies such as smart contracts and PKI is also given.