Blockchain has various merits such as decentralization, greater transparency and improved traceability. Nowadays blockchain is used at various numbers of applications such as financial related services, business & industry, integrity verification, governance, health and education sectors. Even though the blockchain technology has promising approaches for the building the future of internet systems and also extensive research is going on about the technical challenges. In this paper we presented the comprehensive survey on blockchain and the techniques that can be used to address the scalability issues with respect to storage and also different privacy preserving techniques that can be incorporated during the implementation of blockchain application.
Blockchain is regarded as a significant innovation and shows a set of promising features that can certainly address existing issues in real time applications. Decentralization, greater transparency, improved traceability and secure architecture can revolutionize healthcare systems. With the help of advancement in computer technologies, most healthcare institutions try to store patient data digitally rather than on paper. Electronic health records are regarded as some of the most important assets in healthcare system and are required to be shared among different hospitals and other organizations to improve diagnosis efficiency. While sharing patients' details, certain basic standards such as integrity and confidentiality of the information need to be considered. Blockchain technology provides the above standards with features of immutability and granting access to stored information only to authorized users. The examination approach depends on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (or PRISMA) rules and an efficient planned search convention is utilized to look through multiple scientific databases to recognize, investigate and separate every important publication. In this paper, we present a solid systematic review on the blockchain and healthcare domain to identify the existing challenges and benefits of applying blockchain technology in healthcare systems. More than 150 scientific papers published in the last ten years are surveyed, resulting in the identifications and summarization of observations made on the different privacy-preserving approaches and also assessment of their performances. We also present a significant architectural solutions of blockchain to achieve interoperability. Thereby, we attempt to analyse the ideas of blockchain in the medical domain, by assessing the advantages and limitations, subsequently giving guidance to other researchers in the area.
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