Decentralized Authentication and Secure Distributed File Storage for Healthcare Systems Using Blockchain and IPFS

The healthcare sector involves many steps to ensure efficient care for patients, such as appointment scheduling, consultation plans, online follow-up, and more. However, existing healthcare mechanisms are unable to facilitate a large number of patients, as these systems are centralized and hence vulnerable to various issues, including single points of failure, performance bottlenecks, and substantial monetary costs. Furthermore, these mechanisms are unable to provide an efficient mechanism for saving data against unauthorized access. To address these issues, this study proposes a blockchain-based authentication mechanism that authenticates all healthcare stakeholders based on their credentials. Furthermore, also utilize the capabilities of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to store the Electronic Health Record (EHR) in a distributed way. This IPFS platform addresses not only the issue of high data storage costs on blockchain but also the issue of a single point of failure in the traditional centralized data storage model. The simulation results demonstrate that our model outperforms the benchmark schemes and provides an efficient mechanism for managing healthcare sector operations. The results show that it takes approximately 3.5 s for the smart contract to authenticate the node and provide it with the decryption key, which is ultimately used to access the data. The simulation results show that our proposed model outperforms existing solutions in terms of execution time and scalability. The execution time of our model smart contract is around 9000 transactions in just 6.5 s, while benchmark schemes require approximately 7 s for the same number of transactions.