Blockchain as an enabler for cybersecurity use case: electronic health records in Switzerland

Abstract

In the application of Electronic Health Records (EHR), cybersecurity is an essential control and needs to be strongly considered to fulfill data protection requirements. Regarding cybersecurity needs in Healthcare, blockchain-based technologies seem promising due to the inherent security features. Therefore, this study investigates in cybersecurity requirements for EHR and whether a blockchain-based solution can cover these. There are already approaches which apply Blockchain for EHR, but these do not explicitly consider cybersecurity, which forms the research gap. As a unit of analysis, 'Hyperledger Sawtooth' as an enterprise blockchain platform was used. The results showed that Hyperledger Sawtooth performs quite well regarding the coverage of cybersecurity-relevant requirements for EHR. However, there are 'natural' divergences concerning specific cybersecurity attributes between blockchain-based and non-blockchainbased systems. The outcome of this study is a generic assessment tool which can be used to assess the coverage of cybersecurity requirements for both blockchainbased and non-blockchain-based EHR systems.