Adoption of Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: Challenges, Solutions, and Comparisons

Abstract

Blockchain technology was bestowed through bitcoin; research has continuously stretched out its applications in different sectors, proving blockchain as a versatile technology expanded in non-financial use cases. In the healthcare industry, blockchain is relied upon to have critical effects. Although exploration here is generally new yet developing quickly, along these lines, researchers in computer science, healthcare information technology, and professionals are continually geared to stay up with research progress. The study presents an exhaustive study on blockchain as a technology in depth from all possible perspectives and its adoption in the healthcare sector. A mapping study has been conducted to search different scientific databases to identify the existing challenges in healthcare management systems and to analyze the existing blockchain-based healthcare applications. Though blockchain has inherent highlights, such as distributed ledger, encryption, consensus, and immutability, blockchain adoption in healthcare has challenges. This paper also provides insights into the research challenges in blockchain and proposes solution taxonomy through comparative analysis.

Keywords

• blockchain
• healthcare
• electronic health records (EHR)
• consensus
• decentralized applications
• healthcare management systems (HMS)