A research on impact of blockchain in healthcare

Abstract

Blockchain refers to a distributed ledger technology that represents an innovation in recording and sharing information without the need for a trusted third party. Blockchain technology offers new tools for security and privacy concerns. Marching towards digitization and analytics, this technology emerges as a promising solution for authentication and authorization issues. It sounds so amazing that this technology that originated with cryptocurrencies could not only be applied in digital contracts, financial and public records, and property ownership but also in medicine, education, science and so on. The use case of this technology springs up in every possible direction. This article first analyses the need for this breakthrough technology and explains how this technology works. This work presents a review on various types of blockchain, the consensus mechanisms used, their advantages and limitations. It provides an overview on the various use cases of this technology. This work mainly focuses on its application in Healthcare. The goal of this article is to analyze the usage of Blockchain technology in various fields of Healthcare such as Electronic Health Record, Health Insurance, Biomedical Research, Drug Supply, Medical Education, Remote Patient Monitoring, Interoperability, Location Sharing etc., It investigates the current research trends and finds the gaps and limitations of these approaches. Moreover, it proposes some enhancements to fill in the gaps in the present approach. This work also analyses the importance of Wearable Internet of Things (IoT) devices in HealthCare and the integration of these devices with Blockchain. Finally, this work concludes by comparing Blockchain 3.0 with previous versions.