Federated blockchain system (FBS) for the healthcare industry

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed technology that introduced the well known Bitcoin cryptocurrency into action. Blockchain has been considered for research by many countries and industries. It is being applied in many fields such as the healthcare domain. Many companies started using Blockchain to increase the security and privacy of the Electronic Healthcare Records for their patients. The work in this paper discusses some existing healthcare problems and challenges. In addition, the paper reviews some related work models and provides a comparison that shows their objectives and limitations. Also, a proposed Federated Blockchain System (FBS) is introduced to provide solutions for these healthcare problems and elaborates the technical details of the system architecture. Moreover, the effectiveness of the system has been validated which showed an average of 68–100 ms for performing query operations and average of 0.944–19.041 s for performing writing operations on the system. Finally, a discussion of the system validation and future work are presented.