A Blockchain-Based Distributed Authentication System for Healthcare

Introduction

The fast evolution of Blockchain is paving the way for a system, where multiple parties who do not know each other or who do not trust each other can work together to achieve consensus. This is the key concept behind the first ever digital currency, Bitcoin (Nakamoto,2018). Conceptually, Blockchain serves as an immutable log of records that allows occurrence of transactions in a decentralized manner. Apart from this, Blockchain is distributed in nature and can eliminate single point of failure (Ali et al., 2018). Business sectors that demand high reliability and honesty can use Blockchain technology to gain popularity. It is widely believed that Blockchain would play an important role in the sustainable development of the global economy, enhancing people’s quality of life (Shen et al., 2018). The inherent characteristics possessed by Blockchain makes it pertinent for accomplishing such a vision .This the reason why application of Blockchain technology is not limited to finance sectors anymore. Rather, it has been applied to provide a secure storage and access environment to various other sectors like Healthcare, Transportation, Government, Supply Chain etc. (Aggarwal et al., 2019).

Lately, there has been significant number of research conducted Blockchain and Healthcare in a combined way and the studies can be used to remodel the traditional procedures like health record storage and exchange, end to end drug provenance and traceability, medical claim processing etc. (McGhin et al, 2019; Mohanta et al., 2019b). Now-a-days, easy access of health record as well as exchange of the same among various Healthcare Providers and Research Centres is being given more importance for better understanding of the clinical records. Considering the fact that health records are very exclusive in nature, it is very much necessary to ensure the security and privacy of the exchanged health information. Blockchain, due to its inherent features like immutability, decentralization, verifiable, etc., is an apt solution for providing a secure storage and access environment for exchange of healthcare information (Fernández et al. 2018). In fact, according to an investigation, more than 70% of industry leader predict that the greatest advantage of Blockchain technology is contributing to manage for the healthcare domain (Guo et al., 2018).The traditional health insurance claim and settlement process can be made more efficient and hassle free using Blockchain technology. Since Blockchain technology is particularly useful when multiple authoritative entities want to work together in a common platform for application development process. Hence, a novel distributed system using Blockchain is being presented where the Health Insurance Providers, Hospitals and the Claimants can come together to a common platform and work towards the management of insurance schemes. The proposed system is entitled as Insurance Claim Blockchain System (ICBChain). This study also proposes a novel protocol that addresses the requirements of Healthcare applications like authentication, privacy of patients and their health records, secure data sharing, interoperability and integrity. The proposed approach ensures that only authorized entities can have access to a patient’s health records. This approach also ensures transparency among the entities of the system while sharing information so that any kind of fraud can be avoided. An extensive study of different performance parameters is also provided which proves the efficiency of the proposed system.

The rest of the manuscript is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the existing works in healthcare discipline based on Blockchain technology. Section 3 presents Blockchain technology and its related concepts. Section 4 presents the security requirements of Healthcare domain. After that, in section 5, the proposed distributed model for secure processing of healthcare insurance claims has been presented and described in details. Section 6 presents the implementation details. The formal analysis of the proposed approach is discussed in section 6. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper.