Electronic health records protection strategy by using blockchain approach

Electronic health records (EHRs) provide significant challenges for medical organizations due to the digitalization of traditional medical information. When using EHRs, both doctors and patients are accustomed to spending considerable time conducting the necessary queries; nevertheless, the acquired data is not always related to the sought one, and access may be revoked if this is the case. The exchange and maintenance of medical health records are among the most crucial tasks in the healthcare system. The integrity of health records is crucial, as is maintaining patient anonymity, and either would have devastating effects in the event of a breach. Therefore, it is one of the most important reasons to keep electronic health records safe. Modern healthcare infrastructure is notoriously difficult to use, wasteful, and fraught with problems related to data integrity, security, and privacy. Better EHR management and monitoring, however, has the potential to lessen the severity of the problems with security and complexity. The blockchain's potential, with its decentralized and trustworthy nature in the healthcare industry, makes this a reality. Problems with data management and the way information is validated and disseminated are at the heart of the healthcare delivery system's inherent difficulties. Improved access to medication tracking, hospital assets, drug systems, patient information, and so on is the primary benefit of employing blockchain technology in healthcare data management. Because of how important it is to have access to a patient's medical history when prescribing medication, blockchain technology has the potential to significantly enhance the current healthcare delivery system. Therefore, it is critical to develop a blockchain-based system for verifying and protecting medical records. The primary objective of this article is to create a permissioned blockchain-based Ciphertext Policy-Attribute-based encryption system to protect privacy and regulate access to sensitive medical records. When each attribute is optimized throughout the encryption stages, a superior meta-heuristic idea emerges. The optimization idea reduces the ciphertext size, the cost of encryption, and the cost of communication. Finally, the performance evaluation confirms the reliability and robustness of the proposed method in comparison to the state-of-the-art designs. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.