Digital healthcare systems have revolutionized medical services, facilitating provider collaboration, enhancing diagnosis, and optimizing and improving treatments. They deliver superior quality, faster, reliable, and cost-effective services. Researchers are addressing pressing health challenges by integrating information technology, computing resources, and digital health records. However, digitizing healthcare introduces significant risks to patient data privacy and security, with the potential for unauthorized access to protected health information. Although patients can authorize data access through consent, there is a pressing need for mechanisms to ensure such given consent is informed and executed properly and timely. Patients deserve transparency and accountability regarding the access to their data: who access it, when, and under what circumstances. Current healthcare systems, often centralized, leave much to be desired in managing these concerns, leading to numerous security incidents. To address these issues, we propose a system based on blockchain and smart contracts for managing informed consent for accessing health records by the treatment team members, incorporating safeguards to verify that consent processes are correctly executed. Blockchain's inherent immutability ensures the integrity of consent. Smart contracts automatically execute agreements, enhancing accountability. They provide a robust framework for protecting patient privacy in the digital age. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach can be integrated easily with the existing healthcare systems without incurring financial and technological challenges.

翻译：数字医疗系统已彻底变革医疗服务，促进了医疗提供者间的协作，提升了诊断水平，并优化改进了治疗方案。它们能够提供质量更高、速度更快、可靠且成本效益更佳的服务。研究人员正通过整合信息技术、计算资源和数字健康记录，应对紧迫的健康挑战。然而，医疗保健的数字化给患者数据隐私和安全带来了重大风险，存在未经授权访问受保护健康信息的潜在可能。尽管患者可以通过同意授权数据访问，但迫切需要一种机制来确保此类给予的同意是知情的，并能被正确且及时地执行。患者有权了解其数据访问的透明度与问责情况：谁在何时、何种情况下访问了数据。当前通常为集中式的医疗系统在处理这些问题上存在诸多不足，导致了众多安全事件。为解决这些问题，我们提出了一种基于区块链和智能合约的系统，用于管理治疗团队成员访问健康记录的知情同意过程，并纳入保障措施以验证同意流程是否正确执行。区块链固有的不可篡改性确保了同意的完整性。智能合约自动执行协议，增强了问责性。它们为数字时代保护患者隐私提供了一个稳健的框架。实验评估表明，所提出的方法可以轻松集成到现有医疗系统中，而不会带来财务和技术上的挑战。