Health care business model using smart contracts: TokenHealth case

Abstract

After the introduction of Bitcoin, blockchain technology evolved as a solution to provide data integrity, non-repudiation, and availability for different systems. Especially data-sensitive scenarios, such as Health Care, can also benefit from these blockchain properties. Thus, different proposals, both from Academia and Industry, were deployed to allow the adoption of blockchain in Health Care applications. However, there are few discussions about incentive methods to help to motivate new users to adopt health-care systems. Also, little is discussed about performance to execute codes in private and public blockchains. In order to tackle these issues, this work presents an evaluation of TokenHealth, an application for collaborative health practice monitoring with gamification and token-based incentives, on different Ethereum networks. The proposed solution is implemented through smart contracts using the Solidity language and executed using Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). We evaluated the performance of both in the Ropsten test network and in a private Ethereum instance. The preliminary results show that the execution of smart contracts takes less than a minute for a full cycle of different smart contracts. Additionally, we present a discussion about costs for using a private instance and the public Ethereum network.