Blockchain-Based Healthcare Workflow for Tele-Medical Laboratory in Federated Hospital IoT Clouds.

Antonio Celesti,Antonino Galletta,Maria Fazio,Agata Romano,Massimo Villari,Armando Ruggeri

doi:10.3390/s20092590

Abstract

In a pandemic situation such as that we are living at the time of writing of this paper due to the Covid-19 virus, the need of tele-healthcare service becomes dramatically fundamental to reduce the movement of patients, thence reducing the risk of infection. Leveraging the recent Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, this paper aims at proposing a tele-medical laboratory service where clinical exams are performed on patients directly in a hospital by technicians through IoT medical devices and results are automatically sent via the hospital Cloud to doctors of federated hospitals for validation and/or consultation. In particular, we discuss a distributed scenario where nurses, technicians and medical doctors belonging to different hospitals cooperate through their federated hospital Clouds to form a virtual health team able to carry out a healthcare workflow in secure fashion leveraging the intrinsic security features of the Blockchain technology. In particular, both public and hybrid Blockchain scenarios are discussed and assessed using the Ethereum platform.

Highlights

Recent advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have paved the way toward new innovative tele-healthcare services able to face the growing demand of even more accessible medical treatments [1,2]
In the pandemic condition such as that we are living at the time of writing of this paper due to the Covid-19 virus, the need of tele-healthcare service becomes dramatically fundamental to reduce the movement of patients, thence reducing the risk of infection
Blockchain networks approach, in this paper we focus on how a hybrid Blockchain network approach can be used to carry out the healthcare workflow of a tele-medical laboratory running in a Federated Hospital IoT Clouds (FHCs) environment

Summary

Introduction

Recent advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have paved the way toward new innovative tele-healthcare services able to face the growing demand of even more accessible medical treatments [1,2]. In the pandemic condition such as that we are living at the time of writing of this paper due to the Covid-19 virus, the need of tele-healthcare service becomes dramatically fundamental to reduce the movement of patients, thence reducing the risk of infection. The recent innovation brought by Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) paradigms have been only partially taken into consideration by hospitals and more in general by medical centers so far. In this regard, a crucial aspect that has slowed down the wide adoption of such ICT paradigms in hospitals has regarded integrity, security and privacy of exchanged data.

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