MedChain: efficient healthcare data sharing via Blockchain

Blockchain may assist in creating a viable information ecosystem for managing personal health records by incorporating heterogeneous forms of data, including medical big data.

“Further, blockchain may assist in creating a viable information ecosystem for managing such PHRs (Mamoshina et al., 2018) by incorporating heterogeneous forms of data (Yue et al., 2016;Shen et al., 2019;Silva et al., 2019), including medical big data (Kaur et al., 2018).”

Significant attention has been paid in the reviewed literature to maintaining data integrity.

“However, significant attention has been paid to the need to maintain data integrity (Hyla & Pejaś, 2019;Tian et al., 2019;Shen et al., 2019).”

A few studies directed attention to facilitating cross-institutional data sharing and improving efficiency and flexibility of data sharing.

“A few studies have also directed attention to the facilitation of crossinstitutional data sharing (Al Omar et al., 2019), and improvements in efficiency as well as flexibility of data sharing (Shen et al., 2019).”

Manual approvals by users for data movement may impact framework performance efficiency.

“The design of the framework and authorizations for data movement may also be contingent on manual approvals by users, which may impact the efficiency of the framework's performance (Shen et al., 2019).”

Extant research indicates costs including linear increase in protocol costs based on entity characteristics, increased operational overhead and access latency, and transaction/execution costs based on string length and size.

“Additionally, other costs indicated as constraints and limitations in the extant research include the linear increase in protocol costs contingent upon the characteristics and attributes of the involved entities, such as patients (Guo et al., 2018), increased operational overhead (for the patient) and access latency (for the requester) (Shen et al., 2019), and the transaction and execution costs”