LIVER: A Next-Generation Secure and Lightweight Blockchain-IPFS Edge Computing Model for Healthcare with Queueing Techniques

A digital revolution is taking place in healthcare due to rising patient data volumes, concerns about privacy and security, and the need for interoperable solutions. The demand for trustworthy, scalable, and interoperable technologies has become essential in this fast-growing healthcare industry. Conventional centralised systems regularly encounter challenges meeting these requirements because of problems including storage structure, data privacy, security vulnerabilities, network complexity, and lack of scalability. Additionally, current blockchain implementations frequently face challenges with interoperability, trust management among several healthcare stakeholders, and throughput bottlenecks. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces a novel framework called LIVER: a Lightweight Infrastructure for Verifiable Electronic Records that integrates Blockchain, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Edge computing, and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to address these issues. Distributed processing based on edge computing and IPFS, cryptographic methods, blockchain consensus mechanisms, and an immutable ledger allows it to be scalable, secure, interoperable, and boast tamper-proof data integrity. Furthermore, a unique queueing approach has been implemented to improve operational efficiency, which controls patient flow, decreases wait times, maximises resource utilisation, minimises healthcare delays, and enhances the patient experience. Finally, based on the experimental evaluation results, the LIVER framework reduces ledger size, facilitates enhanced data sharing, and improves the healthcare system’s efficiency, scalability, security, and performance. The goal is to provide a framework that can handle the computational and operational limitations of existing healthcare systems while still protecting patient privacy and allowing for scalability.