An Integrated Approach for Secure and Efficient Sharing of EHR in Federated Blockchains

In the healthcare domain, blockchains technology plays a vital role in securely sharing electronic health records (EHRs) among network participants. Unfortunately, the fragmentation of private blockchain deployments disallows the sharing of EHRs across network boundaries. To address this problem, we propose a blockchain federation that supports efficient inter-blockchain communication. Our federation adopts a unified integrated approach that consists of registering independent networks and deploying a unified module in each participating network. By establishing a one-to-many connection between networks, our federation enables querying transactions from the source network to trigger a smart contract in the target blockchain for accessing patient’s records. Through experiments involving multiple blockchains deployed on different platforms, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed healthcare blockchain federation. The experimental results validate the applicability of our solution in promoting efficient inter-blockchain communication and extending EHRs sharing beyond a single network boundary.