HealChain: A Decentralized Data Management System for Mobile Healthcare Using Consortium Blockchain

Nowadays, massive healthcare data is collected for analysis and diagnosis from various applications and devices in mobile healthcare. To manage these data, existing work proposed centralized data management while this causes unexpected security threats, such as single point of failure and typical DDoS attack. For secure data management, we leverage blockchain technology and present a decentralized data management system based on consortium blockchain, called by HealChain. Specifically, network-wide healthcare data is processed by consortium blockchain nodes (CBNs) from collection, verification and recording in a strictly distributed manner. To realize HealChain, a hierarchical architecture with three layers is elaborately designed to facilitate network functionalities. After that, an operation procedure is put forward for ensuring considerate interactions between users and CBNs. Moreover, we formulate an optimization problem for a CBN to maximize the economic benefit in the mining procedure by optimizing the computing power. Genetic algorithm is utilized to solve the problem. Security analysis and numerical results demonstrate that HealChain is effective and efficient to achieve secure data management for mobile healthcare.