MedShard: Electronic Health Record Sharing Using Blockchain Sharding

Faiza Hashim, Khaled Shuaib and Farag Sallabi
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Faiza Hashim: Department of Information Systems and Security, College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Khalifa Bin Zayed Street, Asharej, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates
Khaled Shuaib: Department of Information Systems and Security, College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Khalifa Bin Zayed Street, Asharej, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates
Farag Sallabi: Department of Computer and Network Engineering, College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Khalifa Bin Zayed Street, Asharej, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-21

Abstract: Electronic health records (EHRs) are important assets of the healthcare system and should be shared among medical practitioners to improve the accuracy and efficiency of diagnosis. Blockchain technology has been investigated and adopted in healthcare as a solution for EHR sharing while preserving privacy and security. Blockchain can revolutionize the healthcare system by providing a decentralized, distributed, immutable, and secure architecture. However, scalability has always been a bottleneck in blockchain networks due to the consensus mechanism and ledger replication to all network participants. Sharding helps address this issue by artificially partitioning the network into small groups termed shards and processing transactions parallelly while running consensus within each shard with a subset of blockchain nodes. Although this technique helps resolve issues related to scalability, cross-shard communication overhead can degrade network performance. This study proposes a transaction-based sharding technique wherein shards are formed on the basis of a patient’s previously visited health entities. Simulation results show that the proposed technique outperforms standard-based healthcare blockchain techniques in terms of the number of appointments processed, consensus latency, and throughput. The proposed technique eliminates cross-shard communication by forming complete shards based on “the need to participate” nodes per patient.

Keywords: healthcare; blockchain; sharding; electronic health record (EHR); scalability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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