Using Leader Election and Blockchain in E-Health

摘要

The development of electronic healthcare systems requires to adopt modern technologies and architectures. The use of Electronic Personal Health Record (E-PHR) should be supported by efficient storage such as cloud storage which enables more security, availability and accessibility of patients’ records. Actually, the increase of availability of E-PHR enhances parallel access, which improves the performance and the throughput of the system. Using distributed systems, users are able to communicate and to share resources to achieve specific goals. Such kind of access needs to have more coordination to maintain parallelism, which can be provided through leader election algorithms. In leader election algorithms, users elect one of them as a leader to coordinate the work and to prevent conflicts. This paper introduces an adoptive leader election algorithm (ALEA) that considers medical and healthcare specifications, since it uses leader election algorithm for E-PHR in the cloud environment. The use of ALEA improves performance by allowing more parallelism and reducing the number of coordinating messages within the system, as well as facilitating the medical specifications such as having a primary doctor or handling emergency situations. Moreover, the paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of using Blockchain technology in the field of healthcare. In fact, the paper investigates the implementation challenges of ALEA concepts using Blockchain technology.