Blockchain in Healthcare and Medicine: A Contemporary Research of Applications, Challenges, and Future Perspectives

TL;DR

This paper reviews the adoption of blockchain technology in healthcare, highlighting its applications in medical data security, supply chain management, and clinical research, while discussing current challenges and future prospects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of blockchain applications in healthcare, emphasizing recent developments, existing solutions, and future challenges in the field.

Findings

Blockchain enhances security and integrity of medical records.

Several companies are implementing blockchain for healthcare data management.

Challenges include scalability, privacy, and regulatory issues.

Abstract

Blockchain technology is one of the most contemporary and disruptive technologies in the world. It has gained considerable attention in numerous applications such as financial services, cybersecurity applications, Internet of Things (IoT), network data management. Now its range of applications is beyond the financial services as the healthcare industry has also adopted blockchain technology in its various subdomains such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical supply chain management system, genomic market, neuroscience technology, clinical research, and pharmaceutical medicine. Blockchain is considered a secure and viable solution for storing and accessing patients medical records and the patients can diagnosed and treated with safe and secure data sharing. Blockchain technology will revolutionize the healthcare systems with personalized, authentic, and secure access to the clinical data of patients and that data can be used for further health improvements and clinical researches. In this paper, we conduct a contemporary research on existing applications and developments in healthcare industry with the use of blockchain technology. We also discuss some robust applications and various existing companies that are using blockchain solutions for securing their data along with some current challenges and future perspectives.