Blockchain in healthcare applications: Research challenges and opportunities

By Thomas McGhin, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, C. Liu, De-biao He. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 2019

690 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Blockchain has a range of built-in features, such as distributed ledger, decentralized storage, authentication, security, and immutability, and has moved beyond hype to practical applications in industry sectors such as Healthcare. Blockchain applications in the healthcare sector generally require more stringent authentication, interoperability, and record sharing requirements, due to exacting legal requirements, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Building on existing blockchain technologies, researchers in both academia and industry have started to explore applications that are geared toward healthcare use. These applications include smart contracts, fraud detection, and identity verification. Even with these improvements, there are still concerns as blockchain technology has its own specific vulnerabilities and issues that need to be addressed, such as mining incentives, mining attacks, and key management. Additionally, many of the healthcare applications have unique requirements that are not addressed by many of the blockchain experiments being explored, as highlighted in this survey paper. A number of potential research opportunities are also discussed in this paper.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c1e98fa629cd65080afd919eecb8628829fe66ce

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Citations in the corpus

A Hybrid BlockChain-Based Identity Authentication Scheme for Multi-WSN (2020, background): “Blockchain technology is widely used in various ﬁelds [17], [18], [19], [20], for example, many researchers apply it to cloud resource scheduling problem [21], and employ intelligent optimal algorithms [22], [23], [24], [25], [26] to improve performance.”
A Survey of Blockchain From the Perspectives of Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities (2019, background): “Distributed ledger technology possesses the potential to transform health services [80].”
Blockchain Meets Cloud Computing: A Survey (2020, background): “Another aspect is that using blockchain techniques to facilitate secure data sharing, e.g., healthcare [75] and smart city [179].”
Applications of blockchain in ensuring the security and privacy of electronic health record systems: A survey (2020, neutral): “In recent times, there is an increasing trend in deploying blockchain in a broad range of applications, including healthcare (e.g. public healthcare management, counterfeit drug prevention, and clinical trial) ( Esposito et al., 2018; McGhin et al., 2019; Pe-terson et al., 2016 ).”
Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Review and Directions for Future Research (2019, methodology): “This survey [54] discussed limited applications for healthcare such as OmniPHR [55], Medrec [56], Pervasive social network (PSN) [57], MeDshare [58] and Healthcare Data Gateway [59].”
A Blockchain-Based Smart Contract System for Healthcare Management (2020, background): “This technology operates without any central administrator or centralized data storage management [13].”
A Survey on Blockchain for Big Data: Approaches, Opportunities, and Future Directions (2020, methodology): “In [78] a secured smart health care system is proposed using blockchain.”
Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges (2021, background): “[93] presented a comprehensive review on research challenges and opportunities in the blockchain in the healthcare context.”