Blockchain based dynamic patient consent: a privacy-preserving data acquisition architecture for clinical data analytics

Clinical intelligence gathered from data analytics plays a significant role in the development of preventive measures and aids the decision-making process. However, due to the scattered and distributed nature of digital healthcare records, accessing data for analytics has become a huge challenge. The main reason for that is data custodians being reluctant to disseminate the records to the external entities due to security and privacy concerns. As the ultimate ownership of medical records lies with the individual patient, this is best resolved by integrating patient consent with existing access control mechanisms. Recently, blockchain has been shown as a promising technology to provide secure and privacy-preserving data sharing on distributed and decentralized environments. Therefore, to cater the requirement of privacy-preserving data acquisition for clinical data analytics in the modern digital health networks, we propose a dynamic consent management architecture leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracts adhering to six key design goals.