Blockchain and Big Data for a Smart Healthcare Model

Introduction

The COVID pandemic showed that the universal health system was unable to deal with such a globally pandemic. Governments, hospitals and health institutions were not connected on a large-scale in order to provide a suitable treatment for COVID patients. Each country was putting personalized efforts and adopting its own strategy (e.g., Lombardy case in Italy). Unfortunately, data was not shared and propagated at an international level so all medical institutions across the world could benefit from this data. The main problem in the healthcare system is the “Interoperability” since each hospital stores its data in different ways compared to different hospitals. Many efforts are concentrated in some countries in order to unify health records on a country level. However, this is not sufficient since it is crucial to keep track of all medical records (e.g., doctor visit, allergy, lab results, medications, procedures) for a patient so in case they move from location to location or even from one country to another. By unifying data we can keep track of medical history for better treatment. As a result of the post-COVID pandemic, the global health community should think about enhancing the healthcare system at an international level since many global health care systems were inefficient ready to handle such a pandemic.

In this context, blockchain technology revealed its importance in many areas (e.g., finance, supply chain management, healthcare, and education). This importance is due to its great features of blockchain technology (Gupta, 2017; Nofer, 2017; Zheng, 2018): scaling, decentralization, consensus, security, anonymity, reliability, availability and much more (Monrat, 2019). Blockchain can store data in a distributed fashion without relying on a central node. Data cannot be erased or edited. In particular, the healthcare field can benefit from the characteristics of blockchain to provide a better medical service (Agbo, 2019; Karafiloski, 2017).

In the blockchain, we store only transactions, for example John is taking anti-inflammatory for a week, in a specific date. The blockchain can store medical records, at an international level, while preserving the privacy of the patient (Es-Samaali, 2017). The patient can decide which data can be public or private. The patient can also be awarded if he/she decided to share its own personal clinical data for research purposes. This is why we should reply on a fully distributed system such as blockchain in order to keep track of our medical history. This is very interesting especially when people are getting medical treatment in different hospitals or maybe travelling from a country to another. All their personal medical records can be saved across the globe in a secure and private way by using blockchain. Blockchain stores a number of transactions in a block; The Bitcoin limits the block size to 1 MB. Each block includes at most 4,000 transactions. Hence, blockchains cannot be adopted for storing a large file size that can reach hundreds of MB or even GB. In fact, many medical images and analysis requires a high-capacity servers in order to store these medical data. Hence, we can benefit from the big data technology mainly for storing large file sizes.