Design and Evaluation of a DeSci-Driven Lightweight Hybrid Blockchain Framework for Privacy-Preserving and Incentive-Aware Decentralized Healthcare Research Infrastructure

Abstract

The rapid digitization of healthcare has brought Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to the forefront of clinical data management; however, persistent challenges of centralized control, privacy breaches, absence of patient data ownership, and the inability to support decentralized scientific collaboration continue to impede scalable healthcare research ecosystems. Recent advances in Decentralized Science (DeSci) introduce a paradigm shift by leveraging blockchain, cryptographic primitives, and decentralized governance to enable transparent, trust-minimized, and collaborative biomedical research. This paper proposes a DeSci-driven lightweight hybrid blockchain framework designed to support privacy-preserving and incentive-aware decentralized healthcare research infrastructure. The framework integrates a permissioned blockchain with a lightweight hybrid PBFT–PoA consensus protocol, off-chain storage, and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)-based authentication to enable secure, privacy preserving data access without disclosing user identity. A tokenomics-based DAO governance layer is incorporated to support decentralized engagement, transparent policy enforcement, and incentive-driven research participation. The proposed system is evaluated through simulation under varying network conditions, with key performance metrics — latency, throughput, and computational cost — assessed across network sizes from 10 to 50 nodes. Simulation-based projections suggest that the proposed framework may achieve lower latency, higher throughput, and improved computational efficiency relative to literature-reported values for MedRec, FHIRChain, and HealthChain under the stated modeling assumptions; these comparisons are model-based and illustrative rather than measurements obtained from a controlled, identical-environment deployment. Beyond data management, the framework enables a DeSci-oriented research lifecycle encompassing decentralized data contribution, validation, and provenance tracking. The simulation-only nature of the current evaluation is explicitly acknowledged as a limitation, with a clear roadmap toward prototype-level implementation on Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum as immediate future work.