A Smart and Secure Blockchain-Enabled Framework for Healthcare Applications

Abstract

Traditional healthcare systems are based on patients approaching physically to get themselves registered and avail of medical assistance. Also, the voluminous data entry into the centralized databases makes the process slow and insecure. Further, the system is unscalable and limited in nature. There are many instances where rural and remote area citizens were denied access to healthcare facilities due to a lack of technological reach. The advent of IoMT has proved to be a boon to the healthcare industry because they have facilitated Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) to store health information remotely in the form of Digital records or EHRs(Electronic Health Records). These devices are worn or implanted in the patients to get the data regularly and keep their health under scrutiny. However, these devices and the information they store are not secure. They are prone to malignant attacks, unauthorized tampering of health information, loss of vital and private information of the users, etc. Blockchain technology is an excellent solution to problems related to privacy and security, access and modification, control of information, forged information, and scalability. The blockchain offers decentralization of information distributed over a peer-to-peer network and stores data immutably. To a large extent, the problems currently faced in the healthcare industry are significantly mitigated. This paper proposes a smart healthcare system that uses IoMT devices coupled with blockchain in its back end. In addition, we have deployed a decentralized application to connect with patients remotely. We have proposed a method to run and deploy smart contracts using Ethereum and interaction between smart contracts and dApp. The results of the implementations are better than the existing systems regarding the security and privacy of patient data, eliminating intermediary costs while maintaining the quality of service through transparency and interoperability provided by Blockchain.