Applications of Blockchain Technology in Medicine and Healthcare: Challenges and Future Perspectives

Blockchain technology has gained considerable attention, with an escalating interest in a plethora of numerous applications, ranging from data management, financial services, cyber security, IoT, and food science to healthcare industry and brain research. There has been a remarkable interest witnessed in utilizing applications of blockchain for the delivery of safe and secure healthcare data management. Also, blockchain is reforming the traditional healthcare practices to a more reliable means, in terms of effective diagnosis and treatment through safe and secure data sharing. In the future, blockchain could be a technology that may potentially help in personalized, authentic, and secure healthcare by merging the entire real-time clinical data of a patient’s health and presenting it in an up-to-date secure healthcare setup. In this paper, we review both the existing and latest developments in the field of healthcare by implementing blockchain as a model. We also discuss the applications of blockchain, along with the challenges faced and future perspectives.

[1]  Damian A. Tamburri,et al.  Blockchains , 2019, ACM Comput. Surv..

[2]  Shanlin Yang,et al.  Blockchain-Based Medical Records Secure Storage and Medical Service Framework , 2018, Journal of Medical Systems.

[3]  P. Fontelo,et al.  Blockchain Technology for Detecting Falsified and Substandard Drugs in Distribution: Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Intervention , 2018, JMIR research protocols.

[4]  Xiao Wang,et al.  Blockchain-Powered Parallel Healthcare Systems Based on the ACP Approach , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems.

[5]  Jesse M. Ehrenfeld,et al.  Blockchain for Healthcare: The Next Generation of Medical Records? , 2018, Journal of Medical Systems.

[6]  Douglas C. Schmidt,et al.  FHIRChain: Applying Blockchain to Securely and Scalably Share Clinical Data , 2018, Computational and structural biotechnology journal.

[7]  Kevin A Clauson,et al.  Geospatial blockchain: promises, challenges, and scenarios in health and healthcare , 2018, International Journal of Health Geographics.

[8]  Thaier Hayajneh,et al.  Healthcare Blockchain System Using Smart Contracts for Secure Automated Remote Patient Monitoring , 2018, Journal of Medical Systems.

[9]  Jiannong Cao,et al.  BlocHIE: A BLOCkchain-Based Platform for Healthcare Information Exchange , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP).

[10]  Tiago M. Fernández-Caramés,et al.  A Review on the Use of Blockchain for the Internet of Things , 2018, IEEE Access.

[11]  Brennan Bennett,et al.  Blockchain HIE Overview: A Framework for Healthcare Interoperability , 2018 .

[12]  Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo,et al.  Blockchain: A Panacea for Healthcare Cloud-Based Data Security and Privacy? , 2018, IEEE Cloud Computing.

[13]  Marek A Cyran,et al.  Blockchain as a Foundation for Sharing Healthcare Data , 2018 .

[14]  Tim K. Mackey,et al.  Leveraging Blockchain Technology to Enhance Supply Chain Management in Healthcare:: An exploration of challenges and opportunities in the health supply chain , 2018 .

[15]  Lucila Ohno-Machado,et al.  ModelChain: Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Healthcare Predictive Modeling Framework on Private Blockchain Networks , 2018, ArXiv.

[16]  Huma Shah,et al.  Development of cost-effective tele-monitoring system for remote area patients , 2018, 2018 International Conference on Engineering and Emerging Technologies (ICEET).

[17]  Gabriel Neagu,et al.  Innovative, Adapted Online Services that Can Support the Active, Healthy and Independent Living of Ageing People. A Case Study , 2017 .

[18]  Thomas F. Heston,et al.  A Case Study in Blockchain Healthcare Innovation , 2017 .

[19]  Khaled Shuaib,et al.  Introducing blockchains for healthcare , 2017, 2017 International Conference on Electrical and Computing Technologies and Applications (ICECTA).

[20]  Hyeon-Eui Kim,et al.  Blockchain distributed ledger technologies for biomedical and health care applications , 2017, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[21]  H. Krumholz,et al.  Blockchain Technology: Applications in Health Care , 2017, Circulation. Cardiovascular quality and outcomes.

[22]  Fusheng Wang,et al.  Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain , 2017, AMIA.

[23]  Mohsen Guizani,et al.  MeDShare: Trust-Less Medical Data Sharing Among Cloud Service Providers via Blockchain , 2017, IEEE Access.

[24]  Zibin Zheng,et al.  An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData Congress).

[25]  Zonyin Shae,et al.  On the Design of a Blockchain Platform for Clinical Trial and Precision Medicine , 2017, 2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS).

[26]  R. Porcher,et al.  Blockchain protocols in clinical trials: Transparency and traceability of consent , 2017, F1000Research.

[27]  Xin Huang,et al.  A Secure System For Pervasive Social Network-Based Healthcare , 2016, IEEE Access.

[28]  D. Upton,et al.  Improving data transparency in clinical trials using blockchain smart contracts , 2016, F1000Research.

[29]  Wei Jiang,et al.  Healthcare Data Gateways: Found Healthcare Intelligence on Blockchain with Novel Privacy Risk Control , 2016, Journal of Medical Systems.

[30]  Matthias Mettler,et al.  Blockchain technology in healthcare: The revolution starts here , 2016, 2016 IEEE 18th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Applications and Services (Healthcom).

[31]  Andrew Lippman,et al.  MedRec: Using Blockchain for Medical Data Access and Permission Management , 2016, 2016 2nd International Conference on Open and Big Data (OBD).

[32]  Julia Adler-Milstein,et al.  Health information exchange policies of 11 diverse health systems and the associated impact on volume of exchange , 2016, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[33]  Melanie Swan,et al.  Blockchain Thinking : The Brain as a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation [Commentary] , 2015, IEEE Technol. Soc. Mag..

[34]  Patrick Blake,et al.  Clinical decision support systems for improving diagnostic accuracy and achieving precision medicine , 2015, Journal of Clinical Bioinformatics.

[35]  Hans-Ulrich Prokosch,et al.  A scoping review of cloud computing in healthcare , 2015, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

[36]  M. Berman,et al.  Technology and managed care: patient benefits of telemedicine in a rural health care network. , 2005, Health economics.

[37]  I. Kohane,et al.  Public standards and patients' control: how to keep electronic medical records accessible but private. , 2001, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[38]  D. J. Berry,et al.  Clinical consultations using store-and-forward telemedicine technology. , 1999, Mayo Clinic proceedings.

[39]  Thomas H. Pollak,et al.  Premiums without Benefits: Waste and Inefficiency in the Commercial Health Insurance Industry , 1991, International journal of health services : planning, administration, evaluation.

[40]  ETHEREUM: A SECURE DECENTRALISED GENERALISED TRANSACTION LEDGER , 2019 .

[41]  V. Plotnikov,et al.  The Prospects for the Use of Digital Technology “Blockchain” in the Pharmaceutical Market , 2018 .

[42]  Guzman Trujllo,et al.  The role of blockchain in the pharmaceutical industry supply chain as a tool for reducing the flow of counterfeit drugs , 2018 .

[43]  Safa Shubbar,et al.  Ultrasound Medical Imaging Systems Using Telemedicine and Blockchain for Remote Monitoring of Responses to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Women’s Breast Cancer: Concept and Implementation , 2017 .

[44]  A. Lippman,et al.  A Case Study for Blockchain in Healthcare : “ MedRec ” prototype for electronic health records and medical research data , 2016 .

[45]  Vitalik Buterin A NEXT GENERATION SMART CONTRACT & DECENTRALIZED APPLICATION PLATFORM , 2015 .