A review on healthcare information systems and consensus protocols in blockchain technology

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology whereby transactions are bundled into blocks that are chained together cryptographically by hash pointers. Blockchain solutions add trust and privacy to the existing internet due to its tampering resistance and advanced cryptography characteristics. In healthcare systems, the technology has been implemented to ensure transparency, auditability, interoperability, and proper governance and management of patient information. This study evaluates blockchain based healthcare systems. Three most common systems were chosen from public, private/consortium blockchains. The evaluation was done using framework for performance monitoring for blockchain systems. To describe resource usage, we used five performance evaluation metrics i.e. memory consumption, disk write and read performance, network data utilization, transaction execution per unit time, and central processing unit (CPU) usage. The study revealed that the system developed using consortium-based platform outperformed private and public blockchain for more transactions per unit time, and proper utilization of resources of connected nodes such as CPU, Memory, and Disk storage.