Journal Article

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

Junejo, Aisha Zahid, Soursou, Georgia, Siyal, Asad Ali, Ahmed, Kainat, Zawish, Muhammad, Khalil, Aiman

2019

Overview

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.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: Access control / Algorithms / Artificial intelligence / Blockchain / Clinical decision making / Cryptography / Cybersecurity / Data management / Data retrieval / data-sharing / Dermatology / distributed ledger technology / distributed systems / Food processing / Health care / health information exchange, security, interoperability / healthcare, biomedical / Information sharing / Medical diagnosis / medicine / Monitoring systems / Patients / Personal health / Privacy / Reforming / transparency