ParallelChain: a scalable healthcare framework with low‐energy consumption using blockchain

Abstract

AbstractThe blockchain‐enabled healthcare system assists in tackling the inherent issues of centralized healthcare systems, such as data stewardship, single point of failure, and data integrity. However, existing blockchain‐enabled healthcare systems suffer from high‐energy consumption, low transaction throughput, and poor scalability. This work proposes the healthcare framework ParallelChain to tackle the low scalability and high‐energy consumption issue. ParallelChain divides the network into clusters, enabling linear scalability of nodes. The parallel execution of transactions in each cluster improves the throughput. The leader selection process of ParallelChain does not require solving computer‐intensive puzzles, making it more energy efficient than proof‐of‐work. The performance of ParallelChain is validated using metrics such as data transfer, processing time, consensus delay, block congestion, and message exchange. It shows that the amount of data transmitted is 4.6 times more in Bitcoin than ParallelChain with varying nodes. The number of messages exchanged is reduced by 48%, and the processing time is reduced by 2.17 and 1.7 times for varying nodes and block sizes, respectively.