A Novel Blockchain-Based Healthcare System Design and Performance Benchmarking on a Multi-Hosted Testbed

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Health Informatics
• Blockchain Technology

Background:

• The increasing digitization of healthcare necessitates secure and efficient Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) systems.
• Blockchain technology offers a decentralized and secure solution for managing sensitive health data.
• Existing Blockchain-based EHR prototypes often overlook critical performance aspects.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a high-performance Blockchain-based EHR prototype.
• To conduct a realistic performance analysis using a multi-hosted testbed and real-world traffic scenarios.
• To compare the performance of different transaction ordering schemes for Blockchain EHRs.

Main Methods:

• Implementation of a Blockchain-based EHR prototype utilizing Hyperledger Fabric 2.0 and smart contracts.
• Performance evaluation using Hyperledger Caliper 0.4.2 on a multi-hosted testbed.
• Analysis of Gossip-based network traffic using Tcpdump tools.
• Testing with Kafka and RAFT transaction ordering schemes, contrasting with SOLO.

Main Results:

• The proposed Blockchain EHR framework achieved high throughput and low latency.
• The system demonstrated efficient resource utilization for EHR transactions (opening, querying, transferring).
• Performance evaluation in a multi-host environment confirmed the framework's success under realistic conditions.

Conclusions:

• The developed Blockchain-based EHR system offers a robust and performant solution for healthcare data management.
• The use of advanced transaction ordering mechanisms like Kafka and RAFT enhances fault tolerance and efficiency.
• The realistic performance evaluation validates the framework's superiority for secure and efficient healthcare data handling.