DengueCBC: Dengue EHR Transmission Using Secure Consortium Blockchain-Enabled Platform

Abstract

In the last decade, world has faced a lot of troubles in terms of epidemics. Dengue infection is one of the cruelest of such epidemics that has already taken a large number of human lives. Citizen who survives after getting infected by Dengue virus, often suffer from severe side effects that largely impacts their lives, minds, and social interference. Researchers have imparted various notions of methodologies toward care, cure, and management of such patients. But, due to some social obligations and lack of awareness, the information about dengue infection in a particular geolocation gets hidden from the citizen. Administration and associated agencies seem to be reluctant in facilitation of dengue related information. Thus, creating a dangerous situation for the affected zone of dengue. Most of the cases, the information about the dengue affected patients is leaked, damaged, or lost while transferring from hospitals, clinics, or diagnostic centers to the local, regional, national, or global administration agencies. In this paper, we propose a novel system model to minimize the loss or leakage of such valuable information in form of electronic health record by using consortium blockchain platform. The proposed system model, i.e., DengueCBC is envisaged to leverage possible improvement in the current scenario of loss or damage of dengue specific electronic records. The proposed model enables the health clinics to securely transfer the dengue health record in electronic form to administration health agency. The process of such transmission is proposed to be highly secure, robust, tamper-proof, and immutable in nature. Stakeholders having decentralized ledger technologies can get associated with the proposed model to get transparent information about the dengue-based electronic data transmission. Thus, the system model encompasses a new way of catering dengue data transmission in more advanced fashion. We further perform comparison between DengueCBC and existing literature to prove the effectiveness of this model. Lastly, we present some open issues related to the proposed system model and other related works that could be mitigated by implying the prescribed future directions.