Enhancing Cross-Organizational Healthcare Analytics Through Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning

This study explores the integration of blockchain technology with federated learning (FL) to enhance cross-organizational healthcare analytics while ensuring privacy and data security. Federated learning allows multiple institutions to collaboratively train machine learning models without sharing sensitive patient data. Instead, local data is used to train models, and only model parameters are exchanged. However, privacy concerns and data sharing inefficiencies have hindered broader healthcare collaboration. Blockchain, a decentralized ledger technology, addresses these concerns by ensuring data integrity and transparency, providing an immutable and tamper-proof record of all transactions. This study investigates how the combination of blockchain and federated learning can overcome these challenges, facilitating secure and efficient data sharing between healthcare institutions. The study uses synthetic multi-institution healthcare datasets to simulate real-world collaboration scenarios. The blockchain-enabled federated learning system ensures that no raw patient data is shared, significantly reducing the risk of privacy breaches while still allowing healthcare institutions to collaborate on predictive model development. The results show that while there is a slight decrease in model accuracy compared to centralized methods, the trade-off is outweighed by the privacy and security benefits. Blockchain’s integration ensures that model updates are transparent, enhancing trust between institutions and reducing concerns about data integrity. Moreover, the use of blockchain’s smart contracts automates and enforces compliance, further streamlining collaboration. This research contributes to the field by demonstrating how blockchain-integrated federated learning can create a secure, scalable, and privacy-preserving framework for collaborative healthcare analytics. The findings underscore the potential for this approach to enhance healthcare outcomes and improve decision-making across institutions while ensuring patient data protection.