Blockchain in Secure Healthcare Systems: State of the Art, Limitations, and Future Directions

Abstract

Modern healthcare is a data-intensive domain representing an amalgamation of long-term electronic medical records, real-time patient monitoring data, and more recently sensor data from wearable computing. Blockchain in healthcare can address a multitude of challenges in healthcare, including care coordination, data security, and interoperability concerns, as technology advances. Technical challenges such as processing speed and massive data duplication will be resolved as improved technology. This data needs to be accessed seamlessly by a multitude of players from the general physicians to hospitals, medical service providers to insurance companies. Thus, healthcare-related data needs to be verified, securely stored, and shared while maintaining patient privacy and control over what portion of the data is shared, with whom it is shared, and how it is consumed. Blockchain has emerged as a technology stack of choice for distributed authentication, secure storage, and automated analysis of stored data in diverse domains including healthcare. Its distributed nature is a natural fit to the healthcare ecosystem with multiple participating entities and patients in different geographic locations. In this paper, we review the technology of blockchain to the healthcare domain analyzing and classifying work done in the field. Open challenges are identified and future directions for research are also presented.