LSP: Lightweight Smart-Contract-Based Transaction Prioritization Scheme for Smart Healthcare

Abstract

In recent years, several blockchain-based models have emerged to provide a secure way to store and access sensitive electronic medical records (EMRs) across the healthcare sector. These records are of different priorities and business requirements. From our comprehensive literature review, we observe that the existing models have no provision of prioritizing the EMR transactions. This critically affects the quick and streamline sharing of emergency EMRs in a smart healthcare environment. Furthermore, the lack of prioritization significantly restricts the optimal usage of the blockchain network. Motivated by this, we first propose a lightweight and deterministic method to prioritize the flow of emergency healthcare transactions through the smart contract. We also propose logical stateless transaction models for different entities involved in the system with varying levels of trust. Finally, the performance of the model based on the private Ethereum is verified and it outperforms the existing benchmark model in terms of usefulness in the healthcare setting and computation overhead with the use of a simple prioritizing algorithm. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme in the real-time smart healthcare system.