文章基本信息

标题：MedShard: Electronic Health Record Sharing Using Blockchain Sharding
本地全文：下载
作者：Faiza Hashim ; Khaled Shuaib ; Farag Sallabi 等
期刊名称：Sustainability
印刷版ISSN：2071-1050
出版年度：2021
卷号：13
期号：11
页码：5889
DOI：10.3390/su13115889
语种：English
出版社：MDPI, Open Access Journal
摘要：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.