Smarter Smart Contracts: Efficient Consent Management in Health Data Sharing

The healthcare industry faces serious problems in data fragmentation and insufficient data sharing between patients, healthcare service providers and medical researchers. At the same time, patients' privacy must be protected, and patients should have authority over who can access their data. Researchers have proposed blockchain-based solutions to health data sharing, using blockchain for consent management. However, the implementation of the smart contracts that underpin these solutions has not been studied in detail. In this paper, we develop a blockchain-based framework for consent management in interorganizational health data sharing. We study the design of smart contracts that support the operation of our framework and evaluate its efficiency based on the execution costs on Ethereum. Our design improves on those previously proposed, lowering the computational costs of the framework significantly. This allows the framework to operate at scale and is more feasible for widespread adoption. Additionally, we introduce a novel contract that supports searching for patients in the framework that match certain criteria. This feature would be useful to medical researchers looking to obtain patient data.