Efficient patient-centric EMR sharing block tree
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Apr 29, 2025
Abstract
Flexible sharing of electronic medical records (EMRs) is an urgent need in
healthcare, as fragmented storage creates EMR management complexity for both
practitioners and patients. Blockchain has emerged as a promising solution to
address the limitations of centralized EMR systems regarding interoperability,
data ownership, and trust concerns. Whilst its healthcare implementation
continues to face scalability challenges, particularly in uploading lag time as
EMR volumes increase. In this paper, we describe the design of a novel
blockchain-based data structure, MedBlockTree, which aims to solve the
scalability issue in blockchain-based EMR systems, particularly low block
throughput and patient awareness. MedBlockTree leverages a chameleon hash
function to generate collision blocks for existing patients and expand a single
chain into a growing block tree with $n$ branches that are capable of
processing $n$ new blocks in a single consensus round. We also introduce the
EnhancedPro consensus algorithm to manage multiple branches and maintain
network consistency. Our comprehensive simulation evaluates performance across
four dimensions: branch number, worker number, collision rate, and network
latency. Comparative analysis against a traditional blockchain-based EMR system
demonstrates outstanding throughput improvements across all dimensions,
achieving processing speeds $\nu\cdot n$ times faster than conventional
approaches.
