BLOCKCHAIN-BASED PATIENT CENTRIC HEALTHCARE ARCHITECTURE: SECURE MEDICAL DATA SHARING

Abstract

The rapid digitization of the healthcare sector is bringing forward new and serious concerns regarding patient confidentiality, patient data protection and integrity, data integration/interoperability and patient consent management. The traditional healthcare architecture models that have been used for decades are centralized, fragmented and insecure and are no longer able to meet the changing demands and the associated risk factors such as identity theft, violations of confidentiality and inefficiency in managing data. Addressing these concerns, this research systematically explores patient-centric blockchain-based healthcare architectures that provide secure, transparent, decentralized and patient-controlled data management. With an extensive literature review, this thesis identifies present research trends and gaps in blockchain-based healthcare solutions, showing the need for better security mea- sures and consent-management systems with higher interoperability standards. This the- sis proposes DiabeticChain, a novel blockchain-based solution made for managing diabetic healthcare data, improving patient control, data security and privacy using smart con- tracts, dynamic consent management and decentralized storage solutions. The proposed architecture integrates HL7/FHIR for semantic interoperability, modern cryptography for confidentiality and fine-grained access control, and a scalable Layer-2 blockchain plus decentralized storage to support real-time healthcare scenarios. Additionally, TotalSol, a novel multi-layer static analysis framework, is introduced to detect vulnerabilities in Ethereum-based smart contracts. The tool enhances the robust- ness and reliability of blockchain applications, by pointing critical security flaws. Because the proposed healthcare architecture relies on Ethereum smart contracts to enforce con- sent and access policies, TotalSol is developed to analyse these contracts and detect vul- nerabilities before deployment. Using Hyperledger Caliper and comparative studies, our experiments show that DiabeticChain outperforms the selected blockchain-based health- care frameworks on the evaluated performance metrics (throughput and latency). Fur- v thermore, the system considers ethical factors like patient data ownership and compliance with major regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA, combining its technical advancements with legal and ethical healthcare standards.