Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Domain: Applications and Challenges

Background and aims: Blockchain is a chain of digital information and each block stores informationin itself. Blockchain has a distributed, decentralized and shared ledger that is built asa chain of records called blocks. Each block in this chain is responsible for storing some kind ofinformation. Blockchain was introduced through the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, and since then, researchhas been ongoing to expand the applications of Blockchain in other areas of information.Healthcare is one of the industries where blockchain is expected to have a significant impact. Theaim of study is to investigate of the applications and challenges of blockchain in health care.Method: In this article, we reviewed of literature on Blockchain in healthcare. PubMed, Scopus،Web of Science and Google Scholar were searched by using related keywords such as “ Blockchain“, “healthcare”, “decentralized data management” and “health data management”. To selectthe relevant articles, we conducted title, abstract, and full-text screening based on inclusion/exclusion criteria. we used the following inclusion criteria: original articles, full text articles andstudies that used blockchain in healthcare domain. We excluded studies that were not focusedon the development or use of a blockchain, non-English and review articles. Application of theblockchain in healthcare and their challenges were extracted from selected articles.Results: Blockchain technology has various application in healthcare, including electronic medicalrecord management, drug and pharmaceutical supply chain management, clinical research,health education, remote patient monitoring and health data analytics. Based on the review, theuse of blockchain technology in healthcare is associated with some issues and challenges relatedto scalability, transaction delay, collaboration of health institutions, lack of law; and security andprivacy.Conclusion: The use of blockchain technology enables more efficient sharing of information withstakeholders while ensuring data integrity and protecting patient privacy. Blockchain has done agreat job by creating anonymization protocols and consensus on the types of contracts needed tocontrol information, which anonymized data is of interest to tech giants in the field of artificialintelligence. There are significant challenges in the use of blockchain technology in health care,and more research is needed in this field.

کلیدواژه ها:

Blockchain ، health information ، health data management ، cryptocurrency ، decentralized data management