Exploring Research in Blockchain for Healthcare and a Roadmap for the Future

Abstract

Healthcare is a data-intensive domain, once a considerable volume of data is daily to monitoring patients, managing clinical research, producing medical records, and processing medical insurance claims. While the focus of applications of blockchain in practice has been to build distributed ledgers involving virtual tokens, the impetus of this emerging technology has now extended to the medical domain. With the increased popularity, it is crucial to study how this technology accompanied with a system for smart contracts can support and challenge the healthcare domain for all interrelated actors (patients, physicians, insurance companies, regulators) and involved assets (e.g. patients' data, physician's data, equipment's and drug's supply chain, etc.). The contributions of this paper are the following: (i) report the results of a systematic literature review conducted to identify, extract, evaluate and synthesize the studies on the symbiosis of blockchain in healthcare; (ii) summarize and categorize existing benefits/challenges on incorporating blockchain in healthcare domain; (iii) provide a framework that will facilitate new research activities; and (iv) establish the state of evidence with in-depth assessment.

Health-BlockEdge: Blockchain-Edge Framework for Reliable Low-Latency Digital Healthcare Applications

“…For example, EMR/EHR records can be securely managed and monitored by the blockchain, and only authorized stakeholders are given access to append or retrieve the data. Some of the potential blockchain applications in the healthcare sector include: clinical data sharing, maintaining medical history, drug supply chain management, and billing/insurance claims, among others [ 19 , 20 ]. Therefore, in this paper, we integrated blockchain with a three-tiered IoT edge architecture for a elderly remote monitoring use case to ensure trusted data sharing among different healthcare stakeholders, tracking or monitoring of various processes and their phases, and maintaining the medical history of senior citizens, among others.…”

Blockchain and Contact Tracing Applications for COVID-19: The Opportunity and The Challenges

“…With the growing recognition of the distributed nature of health services, the technology of blockchain has enjoyed substantial deliberation in the past three years from the healthcare sector to implement numerous healthcare scenarios on the top of a blockchain [5]. The COVID-19 pandemic has incentified the recent interest of leveraging blockchain for healthcare-related scenarios, including proposing and developing blockchain-based contact tracing apps.…”

Blockchain-based Framework for Online Entrance Examination and Score Card Verification System

“…Blockchain Technology that was originally found to be used in exchanging digital currencies, has started to draw interest in a wide variety of industries such as IoT (Christidis and Devetsikiotis, 2016;Conoscenti el al., 2016), healthcare (Azaria et al, 2016;; Rouhani et al, 2018;Kassab et al, 2019), smart cities (Salha et al, 2019), e-governance (Elisa et al, 2018;Ayed, 2017), intelligent transport systems (Yuan and Wang, 2016;Li et al, 2018), cyber security (Bansal et al, 2020;Taylor et al, 2020), to name a few.Presently some of the universities and institutes use blockchain technology in the field of education for managing credits and issuing degree certificates. Leveraging the Blockchain technology that has gained universal attention over the last few years in a multi-stakeholder, manual and paper based scenario could help fix the issues stated above.…”