MeDShare: Trust-Less Medical Data Sharing Among Cloud Service Providers via Blockchain

By Qi Xia, Emmanuel Boateng Sifah, K. Asamoah, Jianbin Gao, Xiaojiang Du, Mohsen Guizani. IEEE Access, 2017

915 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The dissemination of patients’ medical records results in diverse risks to patients’ privacy as malicious activities on these records cause severe damage to the reputation, finances, and so on of all parties related directly or indirectly to the data. Current methods to effectively manage and protect medical records have been proved to be insufficient. In this paper, we propose MeDShare, a system that addresses the issue of medical data sharing among medical big data custodians in a trust-less environment. The system is blockchain-based and provides data provenance, auditing, and control for shared medical data in cloud repositories among big data entities. MeDShare monitors entities that access data for malicious use from a data custodian system. In MeDShare, data transitions and sharing from one entity to the other, along with all actions performed on the MeDShare system, are recorded in a tamper-proof manner. The design employs smart contracts and an access control mechanism to effectively track the behavior of the data and revoke access to offending entities on detection of violation of permissions on data. The performance of MeDShare is comparable to current cutting edge solutions to data sharing among cloud service providers. By implementing MeDShare, cloud service providers and other data guardians will be able to achieve data provenance and auditing while sharing medical data with entities such as research and medical institutions with minimal risk to data privacy.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49af9119c09b97af977595b011afd8a3f588412d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Information Systems

Citations in the corpus

Applications of Blockchain Technology in Medicine and Healthcare: Challenges and Future Perspectives (2019, background): “Keeping in view such limitations, Xia et al. [25] introduced MeDShare, a safe and secured blockchain system for medical data exchange among untrusted parties.”
Blockchain Meets Cloud Computing: A Survey (2020, methodology): “MedShare [60] system used different kinds of smart contract cooperated with cloud provenance data to achieve access control.”
A Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution, Architecture and Security (2021, neutral): “Some have called such systems ‘‘trust-less’’ [32], [61] and [69].”
Blockchain for Secure EHRs Sharing of Mobile Cloud Based E-Health Systems (2019, background): “The work [19] introduced a system called MeDShare which dealt with the problem of medical data sharing among cloud service providers.”
Blockchain-Enabled Smart Contracts: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends (2019, background): “For example, MeDShare [23] is a blockchain-powered system that provides data provenance, auditing, and control for shared medical data in cloud repositories, its design employs smart contracts and an access control mechanism to effectively track the behavior of the data.”
Blockchain Technologies for the Internet of Things: Research Issues and Challenges (2018, background): “[61] proposed a blockchain-based data sharing system, named MeDShare, for cloud service providers.”
Blockchain for Industry 4.0: A Comprehensive Review (2020, background): “Xia et al. [105] developed a trustworthy blockchain-based system called ‘‘MeDShare’’ especially to handle the challenges of maintaining voluminous medical information on a cloud using big data for data provenance.”
Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Review and Directions for Future Research (2019, methodology): “This survey [54] discussed limited applications for healthcare such as OmniPHR [55], Medrec [56], Pervasive social network (PSN) [57], MeDshare [58] and Healthcare Data Gateway [59].”
BlocHIE: A BLOCkchain-Based Platform for Healthcare Information Exchange (2018, background): “When Blockchain technology meets HIE, there are only few proposed systems [13][14] and they all suffer from the following two problems.”
Blockchain in healthcare and health sciences - A scoping review (2019, background): “…control, data integrity, interoperability 12 [30] Electronic health records Sharing healthcare data between health institutions Data integrity 13 [31] Electronic health records Sharing healthcare data between health institutions Data integrity, access control 14 [32] Administrative systems…”
A Survey of Blockchain Technology Applied to Smart Cities: Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “In [130] and [131], a blockchain-based system called”
Towards Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing in e-Health Systems via Consortium Blockchain (2018, neutral): “Properties Yang [3] Zhang [17] Xia-I [11] Xia-II [13] Peterson [18] Proposed BSPP”
Applications of blockchain in ensuring the security and privacy of electronic health record systems: A survey (2020, neutral): “…which requests the data • data owner ID whose data is accessed • action type (create, delete, query, update) • the validation result of the request Qi et al. (2017) designed a data sharing model with the ability to effectively track the dishonest behaviour of sharing data as well as revoke access…”