Blockchain-Enabled Integration and Coordination for Decentralized E-Health Systems
Vishesh Kumar, Shelly Sachdeva, Vijayant Pawar · 2024
Electronic healthcare systems (EHS) have gained popularity in recent years due to technological growth and development in the healthcare sector. With advanced technologies in healthcare, there are several challenges in securing and maintaining patient data privacy. The challenges are the outcome of uncoordinated, repeated, and frequently duplicated information among several separate e-health service providers and private data that is kept insecure in centralized systems, causing the lack of data availability and secure data sharing. A promising technology called blockchain has emerged that can be used to protect data privacy and secure access while offering a decentralized management framework for massively distributed data. A unified solution for migrating conventional e-health systems from different independent ecosystems and integrating them with a single ecosystem based on blockchain is proposed. We focused on the challenges related to data availability and data storage using the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for decentralized data storage and its coordination with blockchain for maintaining data integrity. The proposed solution focuses on the secure storage of patient data, controlled trackable sharing of sensitive data, and a solution for smooth migration from conventional healthcare to blockchain-based healthcare.