Interoperability and Synchronization Management of Blockchain-Based Decentralized e-Health Systems

Sujit Biswas, Kashif Sharif*, Fan Li*, Zohaib Latif, Salil S. Kanhere, Saraju P. Mohanty

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

61 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

E-health systems have witnessed widespread usage in the last few years, mainly due to advancements in health monitoring hardware and the availability of remote diagnostic services. Given the numerous benefits, there are two main challenges: management of the e-health ecosystem and security and privacy of sensitive data. The former results from nonunified, redundant, and often replicated information across numerous independent e-health service providers. While the later stems from sensitive information stored in centralized systems that can be compromised. Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology, which can be used to secure access and privacy of data and provide an umbrella management solution to large-scale distributed and decentralized enterprise systems. In this article, we present a unified system for migrating independent conventional e-health systems to a single blockchain-based ecosystem. More specifically, we address the issues of difference in data structures for conventional relational databases and blockchain file databases. The solution describes the conversion process and synchronization of information in a unified system for large-scale e-health data. The implementation and analysis show that significant improvements in data storage, access control, and seamless migration can be achieved.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9112689
Pages (from-to)1363-1376
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management
Volume67
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2020

Keywords

  • Blockchain (BC)
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • distributed ledger technology
  • e-health ecosystem
  • interoperability
  • synchronization

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Interoperability and Synchronization Management of Blockchain-Based Decentralized e-Health Systems'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this