Building Efficient Smart Contract for Healthcare 4.0

Abstract

During the past decades, many cryptographic standards and solutions were proposed and used for various applications, such as e-voting, agriculture systems, etc. However, due to security issues, confidentiality, privacy, and latency, the systems were not able to survive. Thus, in year 2008, to tackle the aforementioned problems, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the blockchain concept. Blockchain is a decentralized architecture that stores encrypted form of data in the chain of blocks using hashing algorithms. Today, blockchain technology is widely used in different domains, such as academics, intellectual property rights, agriculture, banking, aircraft, e-voting, car sharing, supply chain, healthcare, and the Internet of Things. However, with the exponential growth of BC-based healthcare systems, security and privacy issues for clinical trials and patient data are facing major challenges. Thus, writing an efficient smart contract for healthcare 4.0 is still a major challenge due to latency, execution time, gas fee consumption, and transaction cost. Motivated from the aforementioned facts, this chapter focuses on how to write an efficient smart contract in the healthcare sector. The chapter identifies some of the recent advancements done so far in different blockchain-based healthcare applications, such as biomedical, genomics, prediction of disease, electronic health records, and pharmaceuticals. The chapter also discusses some of the most important tools and frameworks, such as Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum, Geth, Ganache, Truffle, etc., that help build decentralized frameworks. Also, efficient smart contract performance analysis tools such as Mythrill, Slither, Solidity static analyzer, Oyente, Securify, and SmartCheck are also discussed. These tools help in easy detection and analysis of the bugs and vulnerabilities of the smart contract and thus help build an effective and efficient healthcare system. Finally, the chapter discusses the building of smart contract in Remix IDE using Solidity. The chapter explains the usage and working of Solidity static analyzer to debug code and reduce vulnerabilities. Different screenshots are also provided to help researchers better understand the chapter. Thus, this chapter helps readers easily understand the concept of blockchain and effective smart contract execution in healthcare 4.0 industry, along with in-depth knowledge of different performance analysis tools.