BlockHR – A Blockchain-based Healthcare Records Management Framework: Performance Evaluation and Comparison with Client/Server Architecture
Leila Cheikh Ismail, Huned Materwala, Youssef Sharaf · 2020
Over the last decade, the management of healthcare records has been revolutionized due to the need for accurate and cost-efficient patient-centric care alongside the technological advances. Currently, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are managed using a client-server architecture by which healthcare providers retain the data stewardship. However, this approach suffers from security and privacy issues, a single point of failure, data fragmentation and vulnerability. The data replication, immutability, transparency, security and privacy features of blockchain have a promising future in the healthcare domain addressing the existing issues. In this paper, we propose BlockHR, a healthcare records management framework for healthcare providers and patients enabling better prognosis/diagnosis and follow-up. We analyze the effectiveness of BlockHR in providing security and privacy compared to the client-server approach. We also evaluate the performance of BlockHR versus the client-server approach. Our experimental results demonstrate that client-server approach takes 2.6 times less execution time for data write operation compared to BlockHR. The data retrieval for BlockHR is 20 times faster compared to the client-server approach. We analyze the impact of increasing number of medical records in our evaluation.