Dr. Sanjay G. Patel is a Computer Engineering academic and researcher with a Ph.D. from Charotar University of Science and Technology and an M.Tech. from Nirma University. He is currently a faculty member at Nirma University and has previously served as Assistant Professor at LDRP Institute of Technology and Research, Gandhinagar, with over a decade of experience in teaching, research, and academic leadership. His expertise spans cloud computing, IoT, machine learning, deep learning, big data analytics, and AI-driven systems. He has contributed to funded projects, including supercomputing infrastructure initiatives (Param Shavak), and has guided multiple PhD and postgraduate research scholars. Dr. Patel has published extensively in international journals and conferences, including Springer, IEEE, and Scopus-indexed venues, and holds patents in areas such as IoT-based vehicular safety systems and green computing. He is also actively involved in professional service roles as a reviewer, technical program committee member, and member of reputed organizations such as IEEE and ACM.  

The healthcare industry, one of the most vital yet energy-intensive sectors, is increasingly turning to blockchain technology in pursuit of stronger data integrity, transparency, and security. Despite the growing enthusiasm for blockchain’s potential to transform medical data management, its substantial energy demands remain an underexplored concern, particularly when compared to traditional database systems. This study undertakes a comprehensive empirical investigation to quantify the environmental and computational costs of using blockchain within a healthcare context. This was accomplished by creating a unique blockchain-based healthcare data tracking application and testing it against similar implementations that used MongoDB and SQL databases. Under regulated transactional workloads, a number of performance metrics were carefully measured, including energy consumption (Wh), carbon emissions (g of CO2), processing time (ms), and memory utilization (MB). The results show a clear difference between the three systems. Compared to both SQL and MongoDB solutions, the blockchain implementation used significantly more energy and produced significantly more carbon emissions per transaction, despite demonstrating superior data integrity and immutability.