Designing a secure, scalable, and decentralised healthcare IoT system for patient monitoring and support using sharding in blockchain

Blockchain technology possesses the capacity to greatly enhance medical data management’s accuracy, efficacy, and security when integrated into electronic healthcare systems. However, the scalability constraints present in conventional blockchain implementations have seriously impeded adoption in the healthcare sector. This study examines the crucial role that blockchain sharding plays in addressing these scalability issues and realizing the full potential of electronic healthcare systems. The scalability issue can be effectively addressed via blockchain sharding, which partitions the network into smaller, more controllable segments referred to as shards. Because sharding allows for parallel transaction processing within each shard, blockchain networks may process information at much higher throughput and efficiency. Sharding dramatically increases the throughput and efficiency of blockchain networks by enabling parallel transaction processing within each shard. In the context of electronic healthcare systems, where the seamless exchange, as well as electronic health record (EHR) access among medical professionals, is critical for providing prompt and correct patient care, this scalability boost is especially important. Additionally, this study suggests a transaction-based sharding strategy designed with electronic healthcare systems in mind. This method reduces cross-shard communication overhead and improves network efficiency by creating shards based on patients’ prior interactions with healthcare entities. The suggested solution outperforms traditional healthcare blockchain methods in terms of total throughput, consensus delay, and computational time.