Enhancing Healthcare Management during COVID-19: A Patient-Centric Architectural Framework Enabled by Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain

Abstract

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.