MedChain: Efficient Healthcare Data Sharing via Blockchain

Abstract

Healthcare information exchange is an important research topic, which can benefit both healthcare providers and patients. In healthcare data sharing, many cloud-based solutions have been proposed, but the trustworthiness of a third-party cloud service is questionable. Recently, blockchain has been introduced in healthcare record sharing, which does not rely on trusting a third party. However, existing approaches only focus on the records collected from medical examination. They are not efficient in sharing data streams continuously generated from sensors and other monitoring devices. Today, IoT devices have been widely deployed and sensors and mobile applications can monitor patients’ body conditions. The collected data are shared to laboratories and institutions for diagnosis and further study. Moreover, existing approaches are too rigid to efficiently support metadata change. In this paper, an efficient data-sharing scheme is proposed, called MedChain, which combines blockchain, digest chain, and structured P2P network techniques to overcome the above efficiency issues in the existing approaches for sharing both types of healthcare data. Based on MedChain, a session-based healthcare data-sharing scheme is devised, which brings flexibility in data sharing. The evaluation results show that MedChain can achieve higher efficiency and satisfy the security requirements in data sharing.

Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Review and Directions for Future Research

“…The experimental results showed that the scheme is practical and feasible for patients and medical staff, and can be applied to location information protection in telecare information systems [72]. Shen et al [73] proposed MedChain, an efficient session-based healthcare data sharing based on blockchain. MedChain uses a digest chain structure approach to check the integrity of a shared medical IoT data stream.…”

“…This is done to overcome the efficiency issues of existing systems such as Medrec [56] and MedBlock [71]. The evaluation results show that MedChain can achieve higher efficiency and satisfy the security requirements of healthcare data sharing [73].…”

Blockchain-Based Healthcare Workflow for Tele-Medical Laboratory in Federated Hospital IoT Clouds

“…While the development of new drugs involves substantial costs related to studies to evaluate the safety and updating of the drug, the use of smart contracts guarantees informed consent procedures and allows in certifying the quality of data [18]. An efficient data-sharing scheme, called MedChain is proposed in [19]. It combines Blockchain, digest chain and structured P2P network techniques to overcome the efficiency issues in healthcare data sharing.…”

A Review on the Role of Blockchain Technology in the Healthcare Domain

“…MedChain [88] is a data sharing scheme that incorporates blockchains, digest chain and structure peer-to-peer network to overcome efficiency related to metadata change when sharing data between different entities. This approach checks the integrity of shared medical IoT data stream using digest chain structure.…”