Smart Contract-Based Secure Decentralized Smart Healthcare System

Abstract

Social distancing has been imposed to prevent substantial transmission of the COVID-19 outbreak, which is presently a global public health issue. Medical healthcare providers rely on telemedicine to monitor their patients, particularly those with chronic conditions. However, telemedicine faces many implementation-related risks, including data breaches, access restrictions within the medical community, inaccurate diagnosis, fraud, etc. The authors propose a transparent, tamper-proof, distributed, decentralized smart healthcare system (DSHS) that uses blockchain-based smart contracts. The authors use an immutable modified Merkel tree structure to hold the transaction for viewing contracts on a public blockchain, updating patient health records (PHR), and exchanging PHR to all entities. It is verified by a performance evaluation based on the Ethereum platform. The simulation results show that the proposed system outperforms existing approaches by enhancing transparency, boosting efficiency, and reducing average latency in the system. The proposed system improves the functionality of the SHS environment.