Blockchain-Based Healthcare Workflow for Tele-Medical Laboratory in Federated Hospital IoT Clouds

Abstract

In a pandemic situation such as that we are living at the time of writing of this paper due to the Covid-19 virus, the need of tele-healthcare service becomes dramatically fundamental to reduce the movement of patients, thence reducing the risk of infection. Leveraging the recent Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, this paper aims at proposing a tele-medical laboratory service where clinical exams are performed on patients directly in a hospital by technicians through IoT medical devices and results are automatically sent via the hospital Cloud to doctors of federated hospitals for validation and/or consultation. In particular, we discuss a distributed scenario where nurses, technicians and medical doctors belonging to different hospitals cooperate through their federated hospital Clouds to form a virtual health team able to carry out a healthcare workflow in secure fashion leveraging the intrinsic security features of the Blockchain technology. In particular, both public and hybrid Blockchain scenarios are discussed and assessed using the Ethereum platform.

Blockchain technologies to mitigate COVID-19 challenges: A scoping review

“…Two studies employed blockchain for diagnosing COVID-19 based on blood samples [30] or computed tomography (CT) images [31] . The remaining applications of blockchain were used for telemedical laboratory services [32] , social distancing [33] , securely sharing patients’ data [34] , monitoring isolated people [35] , tracking the COVID-19 status as reported by trusted sources (number of new cases, deaths and recovered cases) [36] , tracking and controlling the delivery of a COVID-19 vaccine [37] , and identity verification, record attestation, and record sharing [38] .…”

“…While the blockchain technology was developed in 10 studies [ 22 , 23 , 25 , [28] , [29] , [30] , [31] , [32] , 35 , 36 ], its use was proposed in the remaining 9 studies. The type of access rights in using blockchain was public in 10 studies [ 20 , 22 , 24 , 25 , 27 , 29 , 33 , [36] , [37] , [38] ], private in 5 studies [ 23 , 26 , 30 , 31 , 34 ], hybrid in 3 studies [ 21 , 28 , 35 ], and both public as well as hybrid in 1 study [32] .…”

“…Specifically, the platform Ethereum was used in 9 studies [ 23 , 25 , 28 , 29 , 32 , [34] , [35] , [36] , [37] ], and Hyperledger Indy was used in the remaining study [38] . While smart contracts were integrated to about 68% of blockchain technologies proposed/developed in the included studies [ [20] , [21] , [22] , [23] , 27 , 29 , 30 , [32] , [33] , [34] , [35] , [36] , 38 ], the remaining studies did not identify whether smart contracts were integrated to their blockchain technologies or not. The programming language used in developing the blockchain technology was determined in 7 studies.…”

“…The programming language used in developing the blockchain technology was determined in 7 studies. While Solidity was used in 6 studies [ 23 , [32] , [33] , [34] , [35] , [36] ], the remaining study used C ++ [22] .…”

“…Of all the included studies, only four studies reported the transaction costs [ 23 , 29 , 32 , 36 ]. In the first study [23] , the average cost of each transaction was USD 10 −10 .…”