Blockchain-Based Electronic Health Records Management: A Comprehensive Review and Future Research Direction

Abstract

Blockchain is the revolutionary invention of the twentieth century that offers a distributed and decentralized setting to communicate among nodes in a list of networks without a central authority. On the other hand, an electronic health records (EHRs) is the electronically stored health information in a digital format.EHRs are normally shared among healthcare stakeholders and facing power failure, data misuse, lack of privacy and security, and audit trail. Blockchain is a leading technology among others to address the limitations related to EHRs. It can provide a safer and secured decentralized environment for exchanging EHRs data. There are three categories of blockchain-based potential solutions have been proposed to handle EHRs: conceptual, prototype, and implemented. This study focused on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to find and analyze articles proposed either conceptual or implemented to manage EHRs using blockchain. The study analyzed 99 papers that were described from various publication categories. The deep technical analysis focused on evaluating articles based on privacy, security, scalability, accessibility, cost, consensus algorithms, and type of blockchain used. The SLR found that the blockchain technology is promising to provide decentralization, security, and privacy that traditional EHRs often lack. Moreover, results obtained from the detailed studies would provide potential researchers with a reference as to which type of blockchain to choose for future development. Finally, future research directions, in the end, would direct enthusiasm to combine new blockchain-based systems to properly manage EHRs.

Interoperability Requirements for Blockchain-Enabled Electronic Health Records in Healthcare: A Systematic Review and Open Research Challenges

“…Different projects in the healthcare department are using different prototypes of blockchain to address and manage the challenges in the healthcare system. e quantitative and qualitative research shows that the implementation of blockchain in healthcare can reduce cost [26,30], improve scalability and interoperability [31,32], and data security challenges [33,34].…”

Blockchain technology applications in the health domain: a multivocal literature review

“…We specified that while the vast majority of the SLR studies in Table 2 addressed the potential application areas of blockchain in the health domain (RQ1), none of them explored the motivation for adopting blockchain in this field in detail. Thirteen SLR studies [ 24 , 25 , 28 , 30 – 35 , 38 , 39 , 62 , 63 ] explore the inherited challenges in health software development that blockchain addresses (RQ2). In addition, these 13 studies discussed the role of blockchain technology in resolving these inherited software development challenges.…”

“…Eleven studies [ 24 – 29 , 32 , 33 , 36 , 39 , 62 , 63 ] explored the challenges of developing health applications using blockchain technology (RQ4). Among these 11 studies, only Agbo et al .…”

“…[ 26 ] and Al Mamun et al . [ 39 ] provided information on possible answers to these blockchain-related problems (RQ5).…”

“…There are other review studies focusing on potential application areas of blockchain in the health domain [ 24 – 39 ], but they do not cover and discuss the challenges faced by practitioners and associated solutions in depth.…”