A SMART PRIVACY-PRESERVING EHR PLATFORM WITH QUANTUM-RESILIENT DATA STORAGE

Abstract

The rapid digitization of healthcare systems has intensified concerns regarding long-term data privacy, dynamic access control, and cryptographic sustainability of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Existing EHR platforms largely rely on static access policies and classical cryptographic mechanisms, rendering them vulnerable to overexposure of sensitive data and future quantum computing threats. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Quantum-Resilient Context-Aware Privacy-Preserving EHR Architecture that integrates field-level privacy intelligence, adaptive policy enforcement, and post-quantum cryptographic protection within a modular and interoperable framework. The proposed architecture employs FHIR-compliant data ingestion to ensure semantic interoperability across heterogeneous clinical systems, followed by a novel context-awareness layer that dynamically infers access conditions based on user roles, temporal factors, location, and clinical severity. A fine-grained privacy classification engine assigns sensitivity levels at the attribute level, enabling selective application of differential privacy for secondary data usage and attribute-based encryption for highly sensitive clinical fields. To ensure long-term confidentiality, lattice-based post-quantum cryptographic primitives are incorporated, supported by cryptographic agility mechanisms that allow seamless algorithm migration without system re-engineering. Blockchain-based audit logging further enhances transparency, integrity, and regulatory compliance. The system is evaluated using realistic clinical datasets, including MIMIC-III, MIMIC-IV, synthetic FHIR datasets, and simulated hospital workflows. Comprehensive evaluations covering privacy protection, utility preservation, performance efficiency, sustainability, and comparative benchmarking demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly reduces re-identification risk while maintaining high clinical utility and acceptable system latency. Long-term projections confirm robustness against quantum adversaries over a 30–50-year horizon. The results establish the proposed architecture as a scalable, future-proof solution for secure and privacy-aware healthcare data management.