Abstract
The healthcare industry faces serious problems with health data. Firstly, health data is fragmented and its quality needs to be improved. Data fragmentation means that it is difficult to integrate the patient data stored by multiple health service providers. The quality of these heterogeneous data also needs to be improved for better utilization. Secondly, data sharing among patients, healthcare service providers and medical researchers is inadequate. Thirdly, while sharing health data, patients’ right to privacy must be protected, and patients should have authority over who can access their data. In traditional health data sharing system, because of centralized management, data can easily be stolen, manipulated. These systems also ignore patient’s authority and privacy. Researchers have proposed some blockchain-based health data sharing solutions where blockchain is used for consensus management. Blockchain enables multiple parties who do not fully trust each other to exchange their data. However, the practice of smart contracts supporting these solutions has not been studied in detail. We propose CrowdMed-II, a health data management framework based on blockchain, which could address the above-mentioned problems of health data. We study the design of major smart contracts in our framework and propose two smart contract structures. We also introduce a novel search contract for searching patients in the framework. We evaluate their efficiency based on the execution costs on Ethereum. Our design improves on those previously proposed, lowering the computational costs of the framework. This allows the framework to operate at scale and is more feasible for widespread adoption.
Highlights
The new coronavirus COVID-19 has a strong transmission and infection capacity [24], and has infected about 229 million people in more than 200 countries or territories
The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows: 1. We propose CrowdMed-II, a new health data management framework based on blockchain, which could address the problems of data fragmentation, data quality, data sharing and patient privacy in health data
Due to some differences in the design of various smart contract structures, the total number of transactions of the six smart contract structures are at the same level, there are some differences
Summary
The new coronavirus COVID-19 has a strong transmission and infection capacity [24], and has infected about 229 million people in more than 200 countries or territories. The panic caused by the disease’s strong infectivity is more disturbing than the illness itself. This suggests that the timely dissemination of accurate and credible information is essential to counter such threat to public health [23]. As mentioned in [1], security vulnerabilities, user data privacy concerns, lack of transparency and other issues will affect the public’s acceptance of such information sharing applications. In order to ensure the public’s acceptance, such a data sharing system needs to ensure the authenticity of the data, that is, the data source is traceable, the transparency of the sharing mechanism, and the security and reliability of the sharing system
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