THE INTEGRATION OF BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY IN HEALTHCARE INFORMATION SYSTEMS: ENSURING DATA PRIVACY AND SECURITY

Abstract

The increasing digitization of healthcare has intensified concerns regarding data privacy, security, integrity, and interoperability within traditional centralized information systems. This study investigates the effectiveness of integrating blockchain technology into healthcare information systems through a mixed-methods experimental approach. A permissioned blockchain-based prototype was designed and evaluated against conventional healthcare data management models using quantitative performance metrics and qualitative validation. The results demonstrate that blockchain integration significantly enhances data integrity and security through decentralized consensus and cryptographic mechanisms, while maintaining high levels of system availability and fault tolerance. Experimental findings revealed consistently high integrity and privacy indices, strong resistance to unauthorized access, and minimal performance degradation during node failure simulations. Transaction throughput remained scalable under increasing workloads, and latency levels were observed to be suitable for real-time healthcare operations. Visual and tabular analyses further confirmed that blockchain-based systems achieve a balanced trade-off between security and efficiency. The study concludes that blockchain technology offers a robust, transparent, and patient-centric framework for managing healthcare data, with broad implications for electronic health records, clinical trials, and healthcare supply chains. These findings support the feasibility of blockchain adoption as a foundational technology for secure and interoperable healthcare information systems.