Secure, Searchable, and Consent-Driven Healthcare Data Sharing System

Healthcare data contains some of the most sensitive information about an individual, yet sharing this data with healthcare practitioners can significantly enhance patient care and support research efforts. However, current systems for sharing health data between patients and caregivers do not fully address the critical security requirements of privacy, confidentiality, and consent management. Furthermore, compliance with regulatory laws such as GDPR and HIPAA is often deficient, largely because patients typically are asked to provide general consent for healthcare entities to access their data. Recognizing the limitations of existing systems, we present a novel approach to sharing health data that provides patients with control over who accesses their data, what data is accessed, and when. Our system ensures end-to-end privacy by integrating a Proxy ReEncryption Scheme with a Searchable Encryption Scheme, utilizing Homomorphic Encryption to enable healthcare practitioners to easily and securely search and access patients’ documents. A time performance analysis is also presented, which allowed us to observe that the number of keywords has a much greater impact on the running time of the different processes than the number of files.