Blockchain-Based Secure and Low Latency Health Record Exchange

In recent years, advances have been seen in enhancing Health Data Management Systems (HDMS) using blockchain to make it more reliable and secure, in particular for sharing patient's health records. However, integrating blockchain into healthcare comes with challenges such as high latency which might cause serious issues for patients needing urgent medical care and less resiliency to cyber-attacks. To address this, we propose a combination of network technologies to improve interoperability in healthcare. In particular, the Ethereum Blockchain, a private InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and the NuCypher network are proposed in this work. This will greatly improve communication efficiency and reduce latency. We built a blockchain based system for sharing patient health records and performed theoretical analysis to minimize end-to-end transaction latency. Our framework highly mitigates various cyber-attacks and accomplish maintaining privacy of users as well. The results show that the proposed scheme significantly decreased the latency and enhanced the security of HDMS.