Lightweight Blockchain for Healthcare

Leila Ismail,Huned Materwala,Sherali Zeadally

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2947613

Abstract

Healthcare data management has been gaining a lot of attention in recent years because of its high potential to provide more accurate and cost-efficient patient care. The traditional client-server and cloud-based healthcare data management systems suffer from the issues of single point of failure, data privacy, centralized data stewardship, and system vulnerability. The replication mechanism, and privacy and security features of blockchain have a promising future in the healthcare domain as they can solve some of the inherent issues of the health management system. However, most of the recent research works on blockchain in the healthcare domain have primarily focused on the permission-less Bitcoin network that suffers from drawbacks such as high energy consumption, limited scalability, and low transaction throughput. Consequently, there is a need for a scalable, fault-tolerant, secure, traceable and private blockchain to suit the requirements of the healthcare domain. We propose a lightweight blockchain architecture for the healthcare data management that reduces the computational and communication overhead compared to the Bitcoin network by dividing the network participants into clusters and maintaining one copy of the ledger per cluster. Our architecture introduces the use of canal, that allows secure and confidential transactions within a group of network participants. Furthermore, we propose a solution to avoid forking which is prevalent in the Bitcoin network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architecture in providing security and privacy compared to the Bitcoin network by analyzing different threats and attacks. We also discuss how our proposed architecture addresses the identified threats. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed architecture generates 11 times lower network traffic compared to the Bitcoin network as the number of blocks increases. Our ledger update is 1.13 times faster. Our architecture shows a speedup of 67% in ledger update and 10 times lower network traffic when the number of nodes increases.

Highlights

Over the last century, healthcare data management has been revolutionized by a wide range of hardware, software, and networking technologies all of which aim to improve the tracking of diseases and their causes, medical treatment, the quality of medical care and drugs, and to establish worldwide prevention plans for chronic diseases
Blockchain technology has strong potential to improve the management of medical data because it can address issues such as single point of failure, data stewardship, system vulnerability, distributed information, and high security and privacy risks prevailing in the existing client-server and cloud-based approaches
Most of the recent research efforts aimed at implementing blockchain in the healthcare domain have focused on the Bitcoin network

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Healthcare data management has been revolutionized by a wide range of hardware, software, and networking technologies all of which aim to improve the tracking of diseases and their causes, medical treatment, the quality of medical care and drugs, and to establish worldwide prevention plans for chronic diseases. Compared to the Bitcoin network, where there are multiple miners competing against each other to generate a block, our proposed architecture uses a single HBCM for this purpose in order to reduce computational overhead and to address the issue of high energy consumption associated with Bitcoin. The replication of the ledger on all the nodes increases the computational and network overheads leading to high energy consumption, low transaction throughput and low scalability To address this issue, our architecture creates clusters of hospitals where the ledger is maintained by only one cluster node and can be queried by the others.

DATA REPLICATION

TRANSACTION HANDLING

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Findings

CONCLUSION