Secure Hashgraph for Healthcare: Strengthening Privacy and Data Security in Patient Records

With the rise of healthcare digitization, it has become a critical priority to safeguard patient privacy and ensure data security. Conventional methods of data access control mechanisms have proven to be insufficient in the dynamic management of patient data access with a fine-grained access control mechanism. This research paper investigates the potential of Hashgraph as a possible solution to strengthen patient privacy within healthcare environments. This paper reviews existing literature on the access control mechanism adopted for maintaining patient privacy, thereby emphasizing the potential benefits of deploying Hashgraph into healthcare systems and proposes to term it as MedHash. By exploiting the distinctive features of Hashgraph in MedHash, such as gossip protocol and virtual voting, every node will autonomously engage in the consensus mechanism thereby solving the risk of power concentration within a few nodes of the network. Since the mining is absent in MedHash, hence the energy consumption in comparison to the proof-of-work blockchains has been greatly reduced. Furthermore, MedHash is resilient against the Sybil and double-spending attacks. MedHash, when implemented in the healthcare scenario, leads to reinforced privacy measures and thereby fortifies data security by empowering patients with greater control over sensitive information.