Economics of Immutability Preserving Streaming Healthcare Data Storage Using Aggregation in Blockchain Technology

The contemporary technology landscape is big data oriented and driven by analytics. The paradigm shift fueled by rapid data generation and higher storage capabilities has resulted in a massive transition across data storage technologies. Traditional database management systems being used in record-based transactional applications are paving the way for new rapid engagement-based data stores leading the newer applications. This transition is a result of a sharp growth trajectory witnessed across many parallel technology landscapes including cloud for storage and processing, Internet of things (IoT) for rapid data generation and transmission, support for unstructured, semi-structured and structured data by social media platforms, and polyglot persistence supported by NoSQL, to name a few. The emerging applications thrive on insights acquired by data analytics, and immutability of data storage is expected to be one of the key factors in growth of forward leaning enterprises. There has been a constant rise in application development requiring a full history of transactions, which is both trustworthy and traceable. Such applications mandate the append-only nature of the data storage to support analytics and trust. Immutability is also the underlying premise of popular cloud native storage systems. This paper explores blockchain technology as a solution for privacy and disclosure compliance in stored healthcare data. Blockchain as a data structure is primed to store only small amounts of data to maintain the properties of immutability, tamper proofing, security, and transparency in applications and is not suitable for storing big data. However, healthcare blockchain implementations have several possibilities for storage management, and the paper presents a comparative analysis of the aggregation-based storage with IoT-based streaming e-healthcare application data for the use case. The in-depth analysis for the potential blockchain storage in the paper includes the cost factors, in addition to immutability and privacy preservation, and the results show that costs may be saved up to an order of magnitude 300 with aggregation.