The highly transmissible COVID-19 virus has wreaked havoc on the global economy, health, and lives. The abrupt burst and exponential spread of this pandemic has shown the inadequacies of existing healthcare institutions in handling a public health emergency. As governments around the world strive to re-establish their economies, open workplaces, ensure safe journeys, and return to regular life, they require solutions to reduce losses. The proposed framework provides virtual assistance from various medical practitioners and physicians. Furthermore, it promotes the accuracy of information gathered from COVID-19 patients, which can aid in the launch of a variety of government decisions and public guidelines aimed at combating health exigencies. The authors present a revolutionary blockchain-based solution that builds trust between the medical professionals and patients while preventing accidental coronavisrus transmission. This solution also keeps track of COVID-19 patients and improves EHR management, which can be a viable solution for common EHR challenges such as lowering the risk of patient data loss, maintaining privacy and security, and obtaining immutable consensus on the maintenance of health records, gaps in hospital communication, and inefficient clinical data retrieval methods. This research work describes a COVID-19 patient-centric blockchain-based EHR employing JavaScript-based smart contracts for a decentralized healthcare management system. The proposed Hyperledger fabric and a Composer-based working prototype ensure the model’s security and the authenticity of the health records. The authors used the Hyperledger Caliper benchmarking tool, which measures latency, throughput, resource utilization, etc., under different conditions and control parameters. The findings highlight the importance of the proposed blockchain-enabled architecture in revolutionizing healthcare administration during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, promoting enhanced clinical outcomes and supporting patient-centered care.

The sum of Big Data generated from different sources is increasing significantly with each passing day to extent that it is becoming challenging for traditional storage methods to store this massive amount of data. For this reason, most organizations have resolved to use third-party cloud storage to store data. Cloud storage has advanced in recent times, but it still faces numerous challenges with regard to security and privacy. This paper discusses Big Data security and privacy challenges and the minimum requirements that must be provided by future solutions. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new technical framework to control and manage Big Data security and privacy risks. A design science research methodology is used to carry out this project. The proposed framework takes advantage of Blockchain technology to provide secure storage of Big Data by managing its metadata and policies and eliminating external parties to maintain data security and privacy. Additionally, it uses mobile agent technology to take advantage of the benefits related to system performance in general. We present a prototype implementation for our proposed framework using the Ethereum Blockchain in a real data storage scenario. The empirical results and framework evaluation show that our proposed framework provides an effective solution for secure data storage in a Big Data environment.

Neoteric biomedical, technological, and normative shifts have prompted care firms to establish clinical governance as a contrivance to assure high-quality service in an exceedingly intricate milieu. Web security is an epochal concern in the healthcare sector, although it has garnered scant attention since the inception of web applications. The necessity to provide adequate security for healthcare web applications (HWAs) cannot be exaggerated, as umpteen health agencies are contingent on them to carry out their operations. Every healthcare organization renders a humongous volume of data available online to practitioners, pharmacies, and patients. Researchers are continually endeavoring to ameliorate techniques to increase the security and longevity of HWAs. In this context, experts examined certain imperative security risks in HWAs to quantitatively evaluate them in the design phase and covered numerous facets of HWAs, along with their security attributes and risk factors. The authors have proposed a combined approach of fuzzy-based symmetric techniques, i.e., AHP-TOPSIS (Analytic Hierarchy Process–Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), for the assessment of alternative HWAs, leveraging the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. Ten consecutive HWAs from local hospitals in Uttar Pradesh, India, have been taken to estimate the security risk, incorporating this methodology to evaluate the priority of weightage and the impact of security attributes. Henceforth, the findings and methodology employed in this study can assist security practitioners in identifying and prioritizing the most influential risk factors to secure HWAs and encourage them to develop revamped or novel methods.

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