Blockchain technology in healthcare: Challenges and opportunities

TLDR

Patients and healthcare providers face challenges in securely accessing, managing, integrating, and sharing health records, and current technologies fall short in privacy, security, and interoperability, especially during public health crises like COVID‑19. This paper reviews the literature to identify how blockchain technology can address these critical healthcare challenges, outlining its opportunities, challenges, and summarizing key products and players. The authors conducted a systematic literature review of blockchain applications in healthcare to assess challenges, opportunities, and existing solutions.

Abstract

Patients and healthcare practitioners are faced with the challenge of accessing, managing, integrating, and sharing health records securely. Patients should be able to manage their health records anywhere in the world, keep track of medical background, give access to data, and share those with any healthcare professional securely. Direct access to data for patients and a more robust data-sharing infrastructure could better prepare the healthcare system to manage public health threats during the emergence of deadly disease outbreak such as COVID-19. Current technologies in use by the healthcare industry do not adequately address these requirements due to limitations related to privacy, security, and full ecosystem interoperability. This paper conducted a literature review to find out the pivotal roles blockchain technology play in solving some of the most critical and challenging issues facing the healthcare industry. This paper identifies challenges and opportunities for implementing blockchain technology in healthcare and summarizes health-related blockchain products and key players offering solutions across different applications. In doing this, our research extends and complements existing blockchain research in healthcare.