PEBS: An efficient patient-enabled blockchain system

Abstract

The precise diagnosis and effective treatment of patients rely heavily on healthcare data. However, sharing healthcare information can be challenging due to the potential risks of unauthorized tampering and data leakage. To address these concerns and facilitate secure and efficient data access for stakeholders within and outside the healthcare system, this study introduces a patient-enabled blockchain system (PEBS). Patient-enabled blockchain system uses the Model View Controller (MVC) approach where the model manages the off-chain and on-chain data, the view is the user-accessible module, and the controller acts as an interface between a user interface and storage layer. It enables patients to control their data by determining specific access permissions and executes various smart contracts for stakeholders' registration, authorization, data storage, query, and update operations. Patient-enabled blockchain system incorporates Modified Proof-of-Authority (MPoA), which has been compared against various consensus algorithms such as Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Authority (PoA), and Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance (IBFT). Furthermore, the suggested system incorporates the utilization of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to address concerns related to performance and storage. We conducted an in-depth analysis and comparison of the system's performance using key parameters such as transaction latency and throughput. Experiments are carried out using network sizes of 10 and 30, with transaction counts from 5 to 500. The experiments show that the highest latency for the proposed system is 58,105 ms, almost 4.8 times less than PoW, which is 283,575 and provides 2.7 times higher throughput (101 transactions per second) than PoW (38 transactions per second).