DSHS: a secure decentralised smart healthcare system using smart contracts

Abstract

Social distancing has been implemented to stop the COVID-19 outbreak, which is currently a major public health concern on a global scale. Telemedicine is used by medical professionals to monitor their patients, especially those with chronic diseases. However, various implementation-related risks, including data breaches, access restrictions within the medical community, inaccurate diagnoses etc., are faced by traditional telemedicine. We proposed the enhanced decentralised smart healthcare system (DSHS) to reduce the risks associated with traditional telemedicine healthcare solutions that utilise blockchain-based smart contracts to monitor, supervise, and carry out transactions. An immutable Modified Merkel tree structure is used to hold the transaction for viewing and accessing revocation contracts on a public blockchain, updating and sharing patient health records with all entities. Performance evaluation is done on the Ethereum platform. The simulation results show that the proposed framework outperforms existing telemedicine solutions by enhancing transparency, boosting efficiency, and reducing average latency in the system.