Design of Patient-centric Hyperledger-based Blockchain Framework for Indian Healthcare Services

Background The Indian healthcare system faces significant challenges, such as data fragmentation, lack of interoperability, and concerns about data security. The increasing digitization of healthcare requires a robust infrastructure to address issues like counterfeit drugs, medical data breaches, and inefficient supply chain management. Processed healthcare data play an important role in improving the quality of healthcare services and supporting effective decision-making. Advancements in the information technology (IT) sector have facilitated the management and maintenance of electronic health records (EHRs), making it essential for IT infrastructure to ensure confidentiality and access control due to the sensitive nature of healthcare data. Purpose Blockchain technology provides a decentralized and tamper-proof solution, ensuring secure, interoperable, and transparent management of EHR across healthcare providers. The proposed research work addresses the issues related to confidentiality and access control of EHR by proposing the Hyperledger blockchain-based healthcare framework, which connects multiple public health centers for secure data sharing. Materials and Methods The role-based access control mechanism helps the participants maintain data privacy in the system. Compared to existing Indian healthcare frameworks, the proposed blockchain framework supports additional features such as authentication, access control, and privacy. Results The framework satisfies the patient-centric need for EHR in the Indian healthcare context by guaranteeing the safe storage and private access to patient healthcare data in the blockchain environment. As the volume of data and the number of users in a blockchain network grow, latency and throughput become critical concerns that must be addressed. Conclusion The performance analysis of the proposed blockchain framework achieved a latency of 0.57 s and a throughput of 170 transactions per second (TPS) for 10 MB block size and 1,000 transactions, which shows outperforming results reported in previous studies.