SPINE: An infrastructure for secure access and sharing of health data

Abstract

The sharing of medical data, especially in electronic form, is becoming increasingly commonplace. Throughout the years, we have found people sharing this data using a bevy of different channels including email, USB thumb drives, or registered postage. These methods of information flow are vulnerable to attack and onerous for institutions to track involved participants. We propose SPINE, a distributed ledger-based medical data sharing file system framework designed to fulfill the needs of accountable and trackable transmission of the Electronic Medical Records (EMR), with the ability to provide continuous sensitive data monitoring services even at offline storage. In addition, we introduce the EMR simulator, an end-to-end simulation tool capable of generating synthetic EMR data, performing heuristic-based EMR modifications, and encoding simulation progress and results in the form of blockchain transactions.