Notarization of Knowledge Retrieval from Biomedical Repositories Using Blockchain Technology

State-of-the-Art Research in Blockchain of Things for HealthCare

Existing blockchain approaches exhibit a diverse set of dimensions, and on the other hand, IoT-based health care applications manifest a wide variety of requirements. The state-of-the-art analysis of blockchain concerning existing IoT-based approaches for the healthcare domain has been investigated to a limited extend. The purpose of this survey paper is to analyze current state-of-the-art blockchain work in several IoT disciplines, with a focus on the health sector. This study also attempts to demonstrate the prospective use of blockchain in healthcare, as well as the obstacles and future paths of blockchain development. Furthermore, the fundamentals of blockchain have been thoroughly explained to appeal to a diverse audience. On the contrary, we analyzed state-of-the-art studies from several IoT disciplines for eHealth, and also the study deficit but also the obstacles when considering blockchain to IoT, which are highlighted and explored in the paper with suggested alternatives.

Data sharing: using blockchain and decentralized data technologies to unlock the potential of artificial intelligence: What can assisted reproduction learn from other areas of medicine?

The extension of blockchain use for nonfinancial domains has revealed opportunities to the health care sector that answer the need for efficient and effective data and information exchanges in a secure and transparent manner. Blockchain is relatively novel in health care and particularly for data analytics, although there are examples of improvements achieved. We provide a systematic review of blockchain uses within the health care industry, with a particular focus on the in vitro fertilization (IVF) field. Blockchain technology in the fertility sector, including data sharing collaborations compliant with ethical data handling within confines of international law, allows for large-scale prospective cohort studies to proceed at an international scale. Other opportunities include gamete donation and matching, consent sharing, and shared resources between different clinics.

Blockchain in Healthcare

Blockchain, an immutable ledger or database shared by peers in a network, is comprised of records of events or transactions that are appended chronologically. Introduced via Bitcoin to the world, blockchain is increasingly being accepted and adopted in different industries and for diverse use cases. Among key industries, health care offers several significant opportunities for applying blockchain conceptualization. Chief areas for health care blockchain applications include electronic medical records management, pharmaceutical supply chain management, biomedical research and education, remote patient monitoring, health insurance claim processing, and health data analytics. Even so, applying blockchain concepts in health care is not without challenges, including interoperability, security-privacy, scalability-speed, and stakeholders' engagement issues. While these challenges may militate against blockchain applications in health care, there are possible countermeasures and implementation techniques, which if adhered to, can reasonably contain many aspects of such challenges.

Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Systematic Review

Since blockchain was introduced through Bitcoin, research has been ongoing to extend its applications to non-financial use cases. Healthcare is one industry in which blockchain is expected to have significant impacts. Research in this area is relatively new but growing rapidly; so, health informatics researchers and practitioners are always struggling to keep pace with research progress in this area. This paper reports on a systematic review of the ongoing research in the application of blockchain technology in healthcare. The research methodology is based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines and a systematic mapping study process, in which a well-designed search protocol is used to search four scientific databases, to identify, extract and analyze all relevant publications. The review shows that a number of studies have proposed different use cases for the application of blockchain in healthcare; however, there is a lack of adequate prototype implementations and studies to characterize the effectiveness of these proposed use cases. The review further highlights the state-of-the-art in the development of blockchain applications for healthcare, their limitations and the areas for future research. To this end, therefore, there is still the need for more research to better understand, characterize and evaluate the utility of blockchain in healthcare.

Improving Opportunities in Healthcare Supply Chain Processes via the Internet of Things and Blockchain Technology

Despite key advances in healthcare informatics and management, little progress to address supply chain process-related problems has been made to date. Specifically, key healthcare supply chain processes include product recalls, monitoring of product supply shortages, expiration, and counterfeits. Implementing and executing these processes in a trusted, secure, efficient, globally accessible and traceable manner is challenging due to the fragmented nature of the healthcare supply chain, which is prone to systemic errors and redundant efforts that may compromise patient safety and impact health outcomes adversely. Blockchain, combined with the Internet of things (IoT), is an emerging technology that can offer a practical solution to these challenges. Accordingly, IoT blockchain offers a superior way to track and trace products via a peer-to-peer distributed, secure, and shared ledger of the blockchain network. This article highlights key challenges related to healthcare supply chains, and illustrates how IoT blockchain technologies can play a role in overcoming these challenges now and in the near future.