MyEasyHealthcare: An efficient and secure three‐tier blockchain‐based healthcare system

Abstract

Blockchain systems have seen vast growth due to the immense potential in developing secure applications for education, healthcare, and so forth. The healthcare system is extensively researched to provide convenience to human life. With the exponential growth in healthcare systems and devices, patient data security and privacy issues are becoming primary concerns. Blockchain is emerging as a solution to secure healthcare records, but it faces certain shortcomings like transaction time, execution time, gas cost consumption, bandwidth utilization, and so forth. The current article designed an extensive blockchain‐based healthcare system (MyEasyHealthcare) with reduced gas consumption, transaction cost, execution cost, and bandwidth utilization, along with enhanced security at three levels. At the first level, the professionals and patients get registered, which provides identity access management. Secondly, authorization is required for each registered entity by the owners. Lastly, the third level includes a doctor‐patient relationship where the hospital's owner assigns a patient to a particular doctor. The data is protected from the outer world and is preserved only between the doctor and the patient. Moreover, to include the majority of tasks for hospital management, the developed system incorporates a smart contract to record seven different parameters for patient diagnosis by a physician and 15 different parameters by a pathologist. The designed system is evaluated for the amount of gas consumed, transaction cost, execution cost, and bandwidth utilization by simulating/executing the written smart contract on InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Remix to check the feasibility of the developed system (MyEasyHealthcare) for the real world; the results testify the proposed system is useful in the real world.