Scalable data management in global health crises: Leveraging blockchain technology

Abstract

Effective data management is crucial in navigating any health crisis. With proper data management protocols in place, stakeholders can swiftly adapt to evolving circumstances during challenging times. A recent event like the COVID-19 pandemic has unequivocally revealed its significance. It is essential to conduct disease surveillance, practice preventive measures, and devise policies to contain the situation. As the process involves massive data growth, it demands an acute level of oversight and control. Monitoring this vast sensitive data faces multifaceted limitations, namely data tampering, breach of privacy, and centralized data stewardship. In response to these challenges, we propose an innovative blockchain-enabled scalable data management scheme in light of the COVID-19 scenario. However, blockchain cannot scale in a large ecosystem due to storing all contents in every participating node. This work addresses this shortcoming by proposing a lightweight solution that groups nodes into clusters, resulting in less memory and processing overhead. Moreover, it adopts an off-chaining technique to reduce the memory load of every node and, thereby, the entire network. The experimental results demonstrate that it attains approximately 85% and 94% storage reduction per node and the whole network, respectively, and an 87% reduction in transaction processing time.