Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing in Telehealth Services

In today’s healthcare industry, safeguarding patient data is critical due to the increasing digitization of medical records, which makes them vulnerable to cyber threats. Telehealth services, while providing immense benefits in terms of accessibility and efficiency, introduce complex challenges in maintaining data privacy and security. This paper proposes a privacy-preserving framework for secure data sharing within telehealth services, employing blockchain technology and advanced cryptographic techniques. The framework ensures that all patient health data are encrypted using homomorphic encryption before storage on the blockchain, guaranteeing confidentiality and protecting data from unauthorized access. Secure multi-party computation (SMPC) is integrated for encrypted data computations, maintaining data confidentiality even during operations. Smart contracts enforce access control, ensuring that patient preferences and regulatory requirements such as the HIPAA and the GDPR are met. Furthermore, the framework includes auditing and verifying data integrity mechanisms, making it resilient against cyber threats such as impersonation, replay, and Man-In-The-Middle attacks. The analysis demonstrates the framework’s superior performance in addressing these challenges compared to that of existing systems. Future work suggests integrating AI-driven threat detection and quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques to enhance security further and adapt to the evolving telehealth landscape.