Blockchain-Enabled Secure Interoperable Platforms For Smart Healthcare Delivery

Abstract

The disintegration of patient health information across a variety of clinical systems is a longstanding obstacle to providing quality, coordinated care. The article introduces the design, implementation, and empirical assessment of blockchain technology-based interoperable platform, BHSChain, specifically developed to connect various Electronic Health Record (EHR) repositories while maintaining the authenticity of the data, patient consent, and adherence to regulatory standards. BHSChain is built with permissioned Hyperledger Fabric ledger, FHIR R4 application programming interfaces (APIs), attribute-based encryption (ABE), and machine learning (ML) based anomaly detection. Experimental comparison with the existing blockchain frameworks shows that it has a maximum throughput of 3,500 transactions per second (TPS) and average transaction time of 0.28 seconds, which is 25% and 20% respectively better than the nearest competitor. Security assessment on six aspects proves its superiority given all the traditional cloud-only systems. The results indicate that blockchain-based interoperability is a promising and scalable approach to smart healthcare delivery with a patient-centric and data-sovereign approach.