SHealth: A Blockchain-Based Health System with Smart Contracts Capabilities

Abstract

Governments rely on collected data to analyze their citizens' health requirements and needs. Such data is usually of scattered manner gathered by several agencies and entities that fall under different business models and goals. Hence, the scattered nature of this data creates a burden on governments in precisely planning adequate health bills that guarantee the wellbeing of their citizens. Furthermore, the issue of synchronizing and having a real-time access to such data exacerbates the problem even more. Therefore, a system that guarantees the integrity, accessibility, correctness and security of medical data in a highly synchronized environment is crucial for governments to accurately project their future needs. In this paper, we present Smart-Health (SHealth), a blockchain-based health management system. In its crux, SHealth is a private multi-layered blockchain integrated with a multi-tiered addressing scheme that defines the privileges and permissions of entities in the system. Blockchain-based systems assure security, reliability, availability, resistance against tampering and malicious attacks, seamless integration, and easy data management. SHealth proposes a complete autonomy to its users. Through a user-friendly graphical interface it capitalizes on smart contracts to initiate various requests and inquiries pertaining to patients such as appointments, medical tests, medications, medical procedures, or history. SHealth is simple, robust, efficient, secured, and completely automated. All the stakeholders in the system can access the health related data stored in a distributed database without compromising its authenticity. SHealth covers all the possible scenarios in health systems from which some of them are explained in this work.