An Investigation of Scalability in EHRs using Healthcare 4.0 and Blockchain

Abstract

In the past decade, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) based on clouds have become popular in empowering remote patient monitoring. The rise of Health 4.0, which includes using system elements and cloud services to access health records remotely, has gained highest attention of the experts. Healthcare 4.0 requires the consistent collection, combination, transmission, exchange, and storage of medical information related to the patients. Because patient information is a private data, it might be challenging to keep hackers out of the reach. As a result, secure cloud storage, access, and exchange of patient medical information is critical in ensuring that the information is not exposed in any unauthorized manner. Security mechanisms that employ Blockchain technology have become popular in recent years since they can provide robust data sharing amongst large number of users and provide storage protection with low computing costs. Researchers have now shifted their focus to using Blockchain to protect healthcare information administration. This work presents an architecture to investigate the scalability of the Healthcare 4.0 systems that use Blockchain. The investigations are carried out under different test scenarios and are evaluated under numerous circumstances, including varying user and data volumes, while also considering the presence of cyber threats. The results demonstrate interesting findings related to the efficiency and effectiveness of deploying Healthcare 4.0 and Blockchain in EHRs.