Blockchain Architecture to Meet Challenges in Management of Electronic Health Records in IoT based Healthcare Systems

Secure, immutable and transparent feature of blockchain has led researchers to find ways to harness its potential in sectors other than financial services. Blockchain is emerging as a popular tool to help solve some of the healthcare industry's age-old problems that have resulted in delayed treatments, inaccessible health records in emergency, wasteful spending and higher costs for doctors, health care providers, insurers and patients. Applying blockchain in healthcare brings a new challenge of integrating blockchain with Internet of Things (IoT) networks as sensor based medical and wearable devices are now used to gather information about the health of a patient and provide it to medical applications using wireless networking. This paper proposes an architecture that would provide a decentralized, secure, immutable, transparent, scalable and traceable system for management and access control of electronic health records (EHRs) through the use of consortium blockchain, smart contracts, proof-ofauthentication (PoAh) consensus protocol and decentralized cloud.