Empower Healthcare through a Self-Sovereign Identity Infrastructure for Secure Electronic Health Data Access
🤖 AI Summary
To address security challenges in electronic health data—including data loss, dynamic access revocation, and emergency access—this paper proposes an open-source, patient-centric health data management framework grounded in Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Methodologically, it introduces a patient-controlled distributed storage architecture integrating fault-tolerant data recovery, dynamic fine-grained permission revocation, and a trusted emergency authorization protocol for unconscious patients. Innovatively, the framework unifies Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials (VCs), and blockchain to enable autonomous identity management, cryptographically verifiable operations, and end-to-end auditable provenance. A prototype system validates real-time access control, automated emergency authorization, and immutable audit logging in patient–physician interaction scenarios. Results demonstrate significant improvements in privacy protection and patient-controlled data sovereignty.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Health data is one of the most sensitive data for people, which attracts the attention of malicious activities. We propose an open-source health data management framework, that follows a patient-centric approach. The proposed framework implements the Self-Sovereign Identity paradigm with innovative technologies such as Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials. The framework uses Blockchain technology to provide immutability, verifiable data registry, and auditability, as well as an agent-based model to provide protection and privacy for the patient data. We also define different use cases regarding the daily patient-practitioner-laboratory interactions and specific functions to cover patient data loss, data access revocation, and emergency cases where patients are unable to give consent and access to their data. To address this design, a proof of concept is created with an interaction between patient and doctor. The most feasible technologies are selected and the created design is validated. We discuss the differences and novelties of this framework, which includes the patient-centric approach also for data storage, the designed recovery and emergency plan, the defined backup procedure, and the selected blockchain platform.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Electronic Health Information Security
Authorization and Access Control
Data Integrity and Verification
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Decentralized Identity
Blockchain Technology
Verifiable Credentials
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