EdgeMediChain: A Hybrid Edge Blockchain-Based Framework for Health Data Exchange

Abstract

Recently, researchers around the world in medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies are demanding a wider access to healthcare data for secondary use in order to provide enhanced and personalized medical services. For this purpose, healthcare information exchange between health authorities can be leveraged as a fundamental concept to meet these demands and enable the discovery of new insights and cures. However, health data are highly sensitive and private information that requires strong authentication and authorization procedures to manage the access to them. In this regard, the cloud paradigm has been used in these e-healthcare solutions, but they remain inefficient due to their inability to adapt to the expanding volume of data generated from body sensors and their vulnerability against cyberattacks. Hence, collaborative and distributed data governance supported by edge computing and blockchain promises enormous potentials in improving the performance and security of the whole system. In this paper, we present a secure and efficient data management framework, named "EdgeMediChain", for sharing health data. The proposed architecture leverages both edge computing and blockchain to facilitate and provide the necessary requirements for a healthcare ecosystem in terms of scalability, security, as well as privacy. The Ethereum-based testbed evaluations show the effectiveness of EdgeMediChain in terms of execution time with a reduction of nearly 84.75% for 2000 concurrent transactions, higher throughput compared to a traditional blockchain, and scalable ledger storage with a linear growth rate. INDEX TERMS Blockchain, data sharing, edge computing, electronic medical records, healthcare, internet of things, privacy, security, smart contracts.

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