ABSTRACT
Electronic health record (EHR) is a patient’s medical record that can be shared among multiple healthcare facilities, labs, and clinics to diagnose a disease. While sharing the EHR data, security and privacy become a matter of concern as the data are stored centrally. Also, the recent trend of storing EHR data on cloud has gained popularity as the data can be accessed anytime and anywhere. However, centralization of data in the cloud suffers from security and privacy issues. Blockchain technology is a decentralized approach in which blocks are linked together to create a chain of blocks. By design, blockchain is secure as the blocks in the blockchain are practically impossible to tamper with and provides privacy by supporting pseudonymity. Blockchain technology has a huge potential to secure healthcare data and preservation of patient privacy within the cloud environment. Many approaches have been proposed in the last few years to employ the blockchain technology for ensuring security and privacy of data in e-health systems. In this chapter, we present a systematic review of the literature of blockchain-based approaches for e-health systems with focus on e-health system security and privacy of patients’ records. Different research opportunities and practical challenges are identified while using the blockchain technology for ensuring security and privacy in e-health systems.
