Intelligent Distributed Computing and Systems Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, Abu Dhabi 15551, United Arab Emirates.
National Water and Energy Center, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, Abu Dhabi 15551, United Arab Emirates.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 May 28;21(11):3753. doi: 10.3390/s21113753.
Blockchain is a disruptive technology for shaping the next era of a healthcare system striving for efficient and effective patient care. This is thanks to its peer-to-peer, secure, and transparent characteristics. On the other hand, cloud computing made its way into the healthcare system thanks to its elasticity and cost-efficiency nature. However, cloud-based systems fail to provide a secured and private patient-centric cohesive view to multiple healthcare stakeholders. In this situation, blockchain provides solutions to address security and privacy concerns of the cloud because of its decentralization feature combined with data security and privacy, while cloud provides solutions to the blockchain scalability and efficiency challenges. Therefore a novel paradigm of blockchain-cloud integration (BcC) emerges for the domain of healthcare. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the BcC integration for the healthcare system to give the readers the motivations behind the emergence of this new paradigm, introduce a classification of existing architectures and their applications for better healthcare. We then review the development platforms and services and highlight the research challenges for the integrated BcC architecture, possible solutions, and future research directions. The results of this paper will be useful for the healthcare industry to design and develop a data management system for better patient care.
区块链是一种颠覆性技术，可以为寻求高效、有效患者护理的医疗保健系统塑造下一个时代。这要归功于其点对点、安全和透明的特点。另一方面，云计算由于其弹性和成本效益特性而进入医疗保健系统。然而，基于云的系统无法为多个医疗保健利益相关者提供安全和私有的以患者为中心的综合视图。在这种情况下，区块链通过结合数据安全和隐私提供了针对云的安全性和隐私性问题的解决方案，而云计算则为区块链的可扩展性和效率挑战提供了解决方案。因此，出现了一种新的区块链-云集成 (BcC) 范式，用于医疗保健领域。在本文中，我们深入分析了医疗保健系统的 BcC 集成，为读者提供了这种新范式出现的背后动机，介绍了现有架构的分类及其在改善医疗保健方面的应用。然后，我们回顾了开发平台和服务，并强调了集成 BcC 架构的研究挑战、可能的解决方案和未来的研究方向。本文的研究结果将对医疗保健行业设计和开发更好的患者护理数据管理系统有用。
