A Comprehensive Review on Blockchain Technology in Healthcare System

Blockchain technology is a transformative force with far-reaching implications in various professional sectors, including healthcare. This technology is characterized by its continuous evolution, fostering trust and information security across geographical distances through a linked series of data blocks. In recent years, the surge in blockchain adoption has spurred extensive research and innovation, particularly in healthcare applications. This survey offers a comprehensive examination of emerging blockchain-based healthcare technologies and their associated applications. It delves into key research areas within this rapidly growing field, providing detailed insights. Moreover, it underscores the potential of blockchain technology to revolutionize the healthcare industry by enhancing data security, fostering transparency, and enabling innovative solutions

Health Block: A Blockchain Based Secure Healthcare Data Storage and Retrieval System for Cloud Computing

Data in healthcare domain is highly sensitive in nature. Besides, there is need for maintaining integrity of such data. Blockchain technology has emerged to solve the problem of data integrity and non-repudiation with immutable storage in distributed repository. Thus secure data storage and retrieval in cloud environments is made possible using blockchain implementation. There are many existing healthcare systems with blockchain integration found in the literature. However, there is need for a system that supports complete set of operations that are governed by smart contracts. Another important consideration is that end users should be able to operate healthcare system without the need for knowledge of blockchain technology. Towards this end, in this paper, we proposed a Blockchain based secure healthcare data storage and retrieval system known as HealthBlock for cloud computing environments. We defined smart contract with underlying structures and functions using Solidity language for Ethereum blockchain platform. We also proposed and implemented an algorithm known as Healthcare Transactions over Blockchain (HToB). This algorithm supports secure blockchain based data storage and retrieval governed by smart contracts. Our system is evaluated using user-friendly web based client application. The experimental results showed that our system is able to ensure data integrity and non-repudiation besides reaping all benefits of blockchain technology

Measuring the impact of blockchain on healthcare applications

Blockchain is a technology with potential for making ground breaking steps in addressing social, economic and healthcare challenges. The global information technology scene is being overcrowded with blockchain applications with special focus on the vast healthcare market [12]. The value of information related to healthcare creates a clear path for applying blockchain as a solution for some of the challenges in the healthcare sector, in particular with the goal of creating a fair and transparent way for sharing information and patient data. It is however a fact that while blockchain technology introduces additional complexity to the implementation healthcare software, the benefit the technology actually brings still remains unclear and difficult to evaluate. This vision paper demonstrates our research focus on providing a body of knowledge and tools to help evaluate this impact of blockchain on eHealth applications. In particular, we identify that such a research effort has to explicitly consider cost of addressing challenges inherent to the eHealth domain like integration of disparate software systems (hospitals, research institutions, government agencies, health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, etc.), the potential introduction of cryptocurrencies in healthcare systems, degree of patient service improvement, transparency and compliance to laws and regulations, and others. The more traditional influencing factors, like cost of development and running, licenses for using third-party software services, and the ones inherent to blockchain like cost of computation and energy will also have to be taken into consideration in the metrics model.</p

Blockchain-based Smart Contracts for Consent Management in eHealth

Master's thesis in Information- and communication technology (IKT590)Since the introduction of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto in a white paper in 2008, Blockchain has gathered considerable attention because of its ability to be decentralized and immutable. Blockchain is still considered as a new and experimental technology, and the state-of-the-art literature review was conducted to identify various use cases for the Blockchain technology for the healthcare industry. Consent management is one of the most critical components in healthcare because of the constantly evolving eHealth services requiring access to personal data, and of corresponding privacy laws, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), created to provide patients with more control over their healthcare data. This thesis focuses on how Blockchain can be used to facilitate consent management, where the patients are in control of who can access their personal data. This thesis creates a consent management solution for healthcare data using Blockchain-based smart contracts built on an Ethereum platform. These smart contracts are developed in Solidity programming language, and deployed in a test network for verification

Blockchain in radiology research and clinical practice: current trends and future directions

Blockchain usage in healthcare, in radiology, in particular, is at its very early infancy. Only a few research applications have been tested, however, blockchain technology is widely known outside healthcare and widely adopted, especially in Finance, since 2009 at least. Learning by history, radiology is a potential ideal scenario to apply this technology. Blockchain could have the potential to increase radiological data value in both clinical and research settings for the patient digital record, radiological reports, privacy control, quantitative image analysis, cybersecurity, radiomics and artificial intelligence. Up-to-date experiences using blockchain in radiology are still limited, but radiologists should be aware of the emergence of this technology and follow its next developments. We present here the potentials of some applications of blockchain in radiology