Blockchain-Enhanced Privacy and Security in Electronic Health Records: A Scalable Framework for Decentralised Data Management

This article introduces a novel architecture that leverages blockchain technology to interface with Electronic Health Records (EHRs), enhancing their privacy and security-assurance properties while enabling scalability. The framework uniquely integrates a sidechain-enabled blockchain architecture with hybrid encryption (AES-256/RSA and ECC), optimising both scalability and data protection, and is validated using the real-world MIMIC-III dataset. The current state of EHR systems has struggled to protect sensitive data from unauthorised access and breaches, particularly when sharing data repositories across multiple platforms. The proposed solution is a blockchain-based, decentralised, and immutable alternative to centralised systems, which carries a lower risk. The framework is tested with a publicly available dataset of healthcare records, demonstrating its superior data safety, scalability, and system efficiency. A comparison with traditional EHR systems is drawn to illustrate the advantages of blockchain over the status quo. This approach promises reduced security vulnerabilities and significantly improved patient data privacy outcomes, providing reassurance in the face of current EHR limitations.