A Storage Architecture for Blockchain-Based Healthcare Systems

Abstract

Patient monitoring and clinical trial management generate continuous large volumes of healthcare data, causing the healthcare industry to be a data-intensive domain. Existing data storage techniques and access mechanics in the healthcare domain exhibit several challenges related to data security, patient privacy, and interoperability. Blockchain technology, together with the support from smart contracts, is considered a proper facilitator for secure and efficient healthcare data storage and sharing. Blockchain technology has unique features, such as decentralization, trustlessness, immutability, traceability, and transparency. Ongoing efforts show promising results considering blockchain technology to improve different aspects of healthcare data sharing and data management. However, all of these initiatives are still in the initial stages and lack technical details. This specifically pertains to the lack of investigation and evaluation of existing storage methods and techniques. Therefore, we will provide a comprehensive evaluation of different storage methods and techniques in ongoing efforts. We introduce a storage architecture for a possible blockchain-based healthcare system. The research proposals are evaluated considering the different storage methods and techniques. Additionally, we investigate the presence of six key requirements to provide a good storage solution. These requirements consist of data location, storage security, access mechanisms, third parties, storage purpose, operations and data integrity. None of the investigated systems meet all six requirements identified in this study. Therefore, we have proposed a storage architecture of our own.