Blockchain in healthcare : Moving towards a methodological framework for protecting Biomedical Databases

Abstract Biomedical databases or repositories have scientific information that is evidence based and protecting such documents from tampering or non-repudiation is very significant. The traditional techniques for the same have limitations in the distributed environments. Scientific contributions are to be safeguarded and it is one of the challenging problems. Blockchain is the promising technology that can support distributed ledger of transactions and thus it is found suitable for protecting biomedical repositories. As blockchain is a proven technology associated with crypto-currency known as Bitcoin in finance domain, it has plenty of opportunities in other domains. In this paper, a framework that is based on blockchain technology (BCT) for protection of biomedical databases with integrity and non-repudiation is presented. The framework will have underlying mechanisms to exploit blockchain to have a protection service and smart contracts to be more flexible and dynamic to adapt new requirements from time to time. The framework is domain specific but can pave way for motivation for adapting it to new domains as well.