Health informatics Article
Topic 7. Designing a Private and Secure Personal Health Records Access Management System: A Solution Based on IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology
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EHM 526 : Special Topic in E Health
Dr. Muneef ALMokhlef
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Article Overview
The privacy and security of patients’ health records have been an ongoing issue, and researchers are in a race against technology to design a system that can help stop the compromising of patient data.
Many researchers have proposed solutions; however, most solutions have not incorporated potential parameters that can ensure private and secure personal health records management, which is the focus of this study.
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Introduction
The privacy and security of health records have been the main concerns of patients, as they do not want healthcare providers to be looking at their files when they do not need to [1]. Giving ownership and allowing full control of health records to patients has been one of the remedies to gain their trust in the system.
However, this does not mean that privacy and security are ensured. Different techniques and technologies that can guarantee patient privacy and security are explored as options in designing systems to supplement existing PHR.
In addition to this, the big data healthcare services hold has become a lucrative source for ransom and is becoming a worldwide issue. These issues are still at large, and researchers and experts are doing their best to come up with solutions that can tackle these issues.
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Objective
This paper aims to design a fully decentralized PHR using IOTA Tangle to secure patient medical records and IOT medical devices with an access management system that gives patients full control of their own medical records.
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Method
To design and develop a solution, this research thoroughly investigated existing solutions and identified potential key contexts. These include IOTA Tangle, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), IPFS protocols, Application Programming Interface (API), Proxy Re-encryption (PRE), and access control, which are analysed and integrated to secure patient medical records, and Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices, to develop a patient-based access management system that gives patients full control of their health records.
The proposed framework, using IOTA as its key element. In this study, IOTA Distributed Ledgers are used to develop a patient-based access management system. IoT devices will be considered in designing the framework, as these patient-data-generating devices may be used at any point throughout the patient’s journey.
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Results
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This research developed four prototype applications to demonstrate the proposed solution:
the web appointment application,
the patient application,
the doctor application,
and the remote medical IoT device application.
The results indicate that the proposed framework can improve healthcare services by providing immutable, secure, scalable, trusted, self-managed, and traceable patient health records while giving patients full control of their own medical records.
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Conclusions
This study focused on designing a fully decentralized PHR using IOTA Tangle to secure patient medical records and IOT medical devices and to create an access management system that gives patients full control of their own medical records.
The proposed framework can improve healthcare services by providing immutable, secure, scalable, trusted, self-managed, and traceable patient health records. IOTA technology eliminates miners, and it enables feeless micro transactions, secure communication between IOT de
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When reading, ask yourself:
What do the author(s) want to know (motivation)?
What did they do (approach/methods)?
Why was it done that way (context within the field)?
What do the results show (figures and data tables)?
How did the author(s) interpret the results (interpretation/discussion)?
What should be done next? (Regarding this last question, the author(s) may provide some suggestions in the discussion, but the key is to ask yourself what you think should come next.) [2].
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Resources
Ganiga, R., Pai, R. M., & Sinha, R. K. (2020). Security framework for cloud based electronic health record (EHR) system. International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 10(1), 455.
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