Decentralized COVID-19 Health System Leveraging Blockchain
Lingsheng Chen, Shipeng Ye, Xiaoqi Li
TL;DR
The paper tackles privacy-preserving, interoperable sharing of COVID-19-related EHR data across multiple institutions by leveraging a blockchain-based solution. It presents a Hyperledger Fabric prototype that combines on-chain storage for public data with off-chain, encrypted storage for private data, enabled by searchable encryption and proxy re-encryption to support authorized access without exposing plaintext. The design comprises a six-component architecture (CA, DO, DU, MIFS, DDBS, BC) and implements essential functions such as data upload, latest/historical data queries, and data sharing through Go-based chaincode and a front-end/SDK. The work demonstrates feasibility in a VM environment and offers a practical pathway toward secure, decentralized health data sharing in pandemic contexts, with clear implications for privacy, data governance, and cross-institution collaboration.
Abstract
With the development of the Internet, the amount of data generated by the medical industry each year has grown exponentially. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) manages the electronic data generated during the user's treatment process. Typically, an EHR data manager belongs to a medical institution. This traditional centralized data management model has many unreasonable or inconvenient aspects, such as difficulties in data sharing, and it is hard to verify the authenticity and integrity of the data. The decentralized, non-forgeable, data unalterable and traceable features of blockchain are in line with the application requirements of EHR. This paper takes the most common COVID-19 as the application scenario and designs a COVID-19 health system based on blockchain, which has extensive research and application value. Considering that the public and transparent nature of blockchain violates the privacy requirements of some health data, in the system design stage, from the perspective of practical application, the data is divided into public data and private data according to its characteristics. For private data, data encryption methods are adopted to ensure data privacy. The searchable encryption technology is combined with blockchain technology to achieve the retrieval function of encrypted data. Then, the proxy re-encryption technology is used to realize authorized access to data. In the system implementation part, based on the Hyperledger Fabric architecture, some functions of the system design are realized, including data upload, retrieval of the latest data and historical data. According to the environment provided by the development architecture, Go language chaincode (smart contract) is written to implement the relevant system functions.