Blockchain-based Frameworks: Technical Overview and Possible Solutions for Healthcare Use

The emergence of Blockchain technology has led numerous industrial sectors to leverage its benefits. Among others, healthcare sector which suffers from many drawbacks, such as, limited access to patients’ electronic medical records (EMR), patients’ sovereignty over their EMR, patients’ EMR privacy, and lack of transparency. By this means several Blockchain platforms have been raised to work on an enterprise-grade level, in particular, Hyperledger frameworks (Fabric, Sawtooth, Iroha, etc.) and R3 Corda by focusing on the Business-to-Business model. Moreover, Ethereum blockchain is designed to be more open to the public users by working on the Business-to-Customer model. As a result, it is difficult to choose a suitable blockchain platform for a certain healthcare application. This paper discusses the fundamental differences between the Hyperledger frameworks, R3 Corda, and Ethereum in terms of main-purpose, components, types of distributed ledgers, types of nodes, consensus approaches, and their possible applications in healthcare industry. Also, we compare the aforementioned frameworks in terms of security, scalability, and interoperability.