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. 2020 May 2;20(9):2590.
doi: 10.3390/s20092590.

Blockchain-Based Healthcare Workflow for Tele-Medical Laboratory in Federated Hospital IoT Clouds

Antonio Celesti  1   2 , Armando Ruggeri  1 , Maria Fazio  1   3 , Antonino Galletta  1 , Massimo Villari  1 , Agata Romano  4
Affiliations

Blockchain-Based Healthcare Workflow for Tele-Medical Laboratory in Federated Hospital IoT Clouds

Antonio Celesti et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

In a pandemic situation such as that we are living at the time of writing of this paper due to the Covid-19 virus, the need of tele-healthcare service becomes dramatically fundamental to reduce the movement of patients, thence reducing the risk of infection. Leveraging the recent Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, this paper aims at proposing a tele-medical laboratory service where clinical exams are performed on patients directly in a hospital by technicians through IoT medical devices and results are automatically sent via the hospital Cloud to doctors of federated hospitals for validation and/or consultation. In particular, we discuss a distributed scenario where nurses, technicians and medical doctors belonging to different hospitals cooperate through their federated hospital Clouds to form a virtual health team able to carry out a healthcare workflow in secure fashion leveraging the intrinsic security features of the Blockchain technology. In particular, both public and hybrid Blockchain scenarios are discussed and assessed using the Ethereum platform.

Keywords: IoT; blockchain; cloud; federation; healthcare; hospital; smart contract; workflow.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Federation of hospitals: clinical data is shared across participants for cooperation.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Federated Hospital Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud (FHC) architecture.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Sequence diagram describing an example of healthcare workflow accomplished in a Federated Cloud hospital environment.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Hospital Cloud software components.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Time comparison for public and hybrid Ethereum network approaches considering a varying number of treatment registration requests.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Cost comparison for public and hybrid Ethereum network approaches.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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