HealthRec-Chain: Patient-centric blockchain enabled IPFS for privacy preserving scalable health data

Many researchers in recent years have shown a keen interest in finding a feasible and appropriate solution for storing big medical data, mainly on cloud-based storage using centralized architectures. But, there are some challenges, like ownership of data, interoperability with other platforms, fault tolerance, and security and privacy issues in implementing a cloud-based storage architecture. So, it is necessary to design a reliable architecture to overcome all these constraints and limitations. This paper proposes a patient-centric framework called HealthRec-Chain to store and share susceptible medical reports and images. The proposed HealthRecChain framework uses distributed file system technology called Interplanetary file system (IPFS) to store automated encrypted health records through Java-enabled GPG encryption to provide high-level security and privacy. It demonstrates the layered approach for HealthRec-Chains through an experimental setup in a given simulation environment. HealthRec-Chain justifies its feasibility by uniquely building a personalized Ethereum dashboard to monitor performance. It also measures a network hash rate to find the security attack's difficulty. It proposes manual benchmarking for measuring its performance parameters. Also, the proposed work compares the existing framework with different performance metrics like latency, throughput, scalability, ease of use, etc. Hence, it validates the feasibility of HealthRec-Chain in a unified view of the solution's healthcare security, privacy, and scalability.