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The COVID-19 outbreak that started in 2020, brought the world to its knees and is still a menace after three years. Over eighty-five million cases and over a million deaths have occurred due to COVID-19 during that time in the United States alone. A great deal of research has gone

The COVID-19 outbreak that started in 2020, brought the world to its knees and is still a menace after three years. Over eighty-five million cases and over a million deaths have occurred due to COVID-19 during that time in the United States alone. A great deal of research has gone into making epidemic models to show the impact of the virus by plotting the cases, deaths, and hospitalization due to COVID-19. However, there is very less research that has anything to do with mapping different variants of COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, constantly mutates and multiple variants have emerged over time. The major variants include Beta, Gamma, Delta and the recent one, Omicron. The purpose of the research done in this thesis is to modify one of the epidemic models i.e., the Spatially Informed Rapid Testing for Epidemic Model (SIRTEM), in such a way that various variants of the virus will be modelled at the same time. The model will be assessed by adding the Omicron and the Delta variants and in doing so, the effects of different variants can be studied by looking at the positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from both the variants for the Arizona Population. The focus will be to find the best infection rate and testing rate by using Random numbers so that the published positive cases and the positive cases derived from the model have the least mean square error.
ContributorsVarghese, Allen Moncey (Author) / Pedrielli, Giulia (Thesis advisor) / Candan, Kasim S (Committee member) / Wu, Teresa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
Blockchain technology enables a distributed and decentralized environment without any central authority. Healthcare is one industry in which blockchain is expected to have significant impacts. In recent years, the Healthcare Information Exchange(HIE) has been shown to benefit the healthcare industry remarkably. It has been shown that blockchain could hel

Blockchain technology enables a distributed and decentralized environment without any central authority. Healthcare is one industry in which blockchain is expected to have significant impacts. In recent years, the Healthcare Information Exchange(HIE) has been shown to benefit the healthcare industry remarkably. It has been shown that blockchain could help to improve multiple aspects of the HIE system.

When Blockchain technology meets HIE, there are only a few proposed systems and they all suffer from the following two problems. First, the existing systems are not patient-centric in terms of data governance. Patients do not own their data and have no direct control over it. Second, there is no defined protocol among different systems on how to share sensitive data.

To address the issues mentioned above, this paper proposes MedFabric4Me, a blockchain-based platform for HIE. MedFabric4Me is a patient-centric system where patients own their healthcare data and share on a need-to-know basis. First, analyzed the requirements for a patient-centric system which ensures tamper-proof sharing of data among participants. Based on the analysis, a Merkle root based mechanism is created to ensure that data has not tampered. Second, a distributed Proxy re-encryption system is used for secure encryption of data during storage and sharing of records. Third, combining off-chain storage and on-chain access management for both authenticability and privacy.

MedFabric4Me is a two-pronged solution platform, composed of on-chain and off-chain components. The on-chain solution is implemented on the secure network of Hyperledger Fabric(HLF) while the off-chain solution uses Interplanetary File System(IPFS) to store data securely. Ethereum based Nucypher, a proxy re-encryption network provides cryptographic access controls to actors for encrypted data sharing.

To demonstrate the practicality and scalability, a prototype solution of MedFabric4Me is implemented and evaluated the performance measure of the system against an already implemented HIE.

Results show that decentralization technology like blockchain could help to mitigate some issues that HIE faces today, like transparency for patients, slow emergency response, and better access control.

Finally, this research concluded with the benefits and shortcomings of MedFabric4Me with some directions and work that could benefit MedFabric4Me in terms of operation and performance.
ContributorsVishnoi, Manish (Author) / Boscovic, Dragan (Thesis advisor) / Candan, Kasim S (Thesis advisor) / Grando, Maria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020