Interoperability Requirements for Blockchain-Enabled Electronic Health Records in Healthcare: A Systematic Review and Open Research Challenges

Abstract

A distributed ledger system blockchain proves to be worthy in the domain of healthcare due to its enormous applications and benefits. Peer-to-peer devolved transactions in an allocated way make the blockchain an efficient and modern tool to be utilized in healthcare as a solution to problems and challenges. The traditional healthcare system utilizes classical approaches to manage and maintain the EHR and cross-domain implementation. Therefore, a systematic investigation is necessary to find the current research trends, challenges, and solutions to implement blockchain to address the challenges. The motivation of this study is to pave the way for future research to find more problem-specific solutions by implementing blockchain to make the healthcare system more robust. The presented systematic survey provides the visualization and graphical representation of current methodologies, challenges, and future directions. The bibliometric analysis has been performed on the published studies in Scopus from 2017 to 2021. The publication published in the first three months of 2021 in the domain of healthcare using blockchain has also been reviewed to find the latest trends in the blockchain. The study covers multiple challenges in the presented systematic literature review, especially the interoperability of blockchain-based systems in the healthcare domain. The presented study results show the top trending research topics, top-ranked authors, and top institutes focusing on blockchain around the world. The proposed study provides a baseline for future challenges and solutions related to blockchain implementation in healthcare.