SENTINEL-Chain: a blockchain-integrated privacy-preserving framework for secure healthcare data publishing

IntroductionElectronic health records (EHRs) are central to healthcare analytics, but their granularity increases re-identification risk when shared. Conventional privacy-preserving methods including k-anonymity, l-diversity, and differential privacy often protect confidentiality at the expense of analytical utility by weakening clinically meaningful correlations.MethodsWe propose SENTINEL-Chain, a blockchain-integrated privacy-preserving framework for secure EHR publishing. The privacy layer combines six mechanisms: Adaptive Correlation-Aware Perturbation (ACAP), Hierarchical Multi-Granularity Generalization (HMGG), Semantic-Aware Anatomization (SAA), Probabilistic Suppression with Utility Bounds (PSUB), Geo-Temporal Indistinguishability (GTI), and Ensemble Privacy Composition (EPC). The blockchain layer adds Merkle Hash Tree verification, PBFT-based validation, zero-knowledge proof compliance checking, and smart contract-based access control. Evaluation used a synthetic dataset (10,000 records) and two real clinical benchmarks (Wisconsin Breast Cancer, N = 569; Diabetes, N = 442).ResultsSENTINEL-Chain attains a privacy score of 79.9% and utility of 98.2%, producing a combined score of 178.1% that exceeds all 16 baselines by 4%-95%. Correlation fidelity reaches 99.9% for claim amounts, 99.6% for length of stay, 99.7% for age, and 99.1% for severity indices. The framework shows 100% resistance to record linkage attacks, with membership inference attacker advantage below the random guessing baseline. The blockchain layer processes 9,988 transactions in 101 blocks with complete integrity verification. Formal Renyi DP composition yields ε = 7.08 (δ = 10−5), and throughput reaches approximately 3,600 records/second up to one million records.DiscussionSENTINEL-Chain addresses five identified gaps in healthcare data publishing: correlation destruction, the privacy-blockchain disconnect, single-technique brittleness, verification without disclosure, and limited attack resistance evaluation. Smart contract gas estimation on Ethereum indicates a per-record registration cost of 61,895 gas units; Layer-2 deployment would reduce costs by 10-100x.