reaches the cloud. Edge computing provides an early station where data could get encrypted. On the other hand, MEC lacks a secure mechanism to share sensitive data such as patient records among MEC nodes. Integrating blockchain and MEC with healthcare applications can increase the security level to the level required by healthcare applications. Blockchain can provide MEC with a secure method to share user requests and patient records among MEC nodes. MEC servers will provide an early point where healthcare sensor data and analytics can be encrypted. Since a limited number of operators own the MEC nodes within one country, the blockchain network between MEC servers does not need to be public. A consortium blockchain could instead be used for the MEC network. Consortium blockchains are semi-private blockchains where a group of known entities has access to the network. The advantage of consortium blockchains is a less complicated consensus algorithm because the limited access on the blockchain means fewer chances of malicious nodes. The simplicity of consensus and the low latency provided by the MEC network can make the blockchain more scalable. This means that the blockchain can handle more transactions per unit time to cope with traffic generated by healthcare IoT devices. Integration with blockchains can be used beyond security enhancement. AI- powered smart contracts can be used on edge to provide low latency process automa- tion for emergency applications in healthcare IoT networks. For example, suppose a disaster is detected by analyzing data from various sensors. In that case, a notifica- tion can be sent automatically to all hospitals in the area to send aid and prepare for receiving emergency cases. 7.4.1 EXISTING WORK ON INTEGRATING BLOCKCHAIN AND MEC Due to the complexity of implementing an integrated MEC and blockchain systems, most work is theoretical. Few projects have built a prototype for the system or part of the system to test their architecture and algorithms. Previous projects had different archi