Applications of Blockchain Technology in Medicine and Healthcare: Challenges and Future Perspectives

• Published in: Cryptography Vol. 3; no. 1; p. 3
• Main Authors: Siyal, Asad Ali, Junejo, Aisha Zahid, Zawish, Muhammad, Ahmed, Kainat, Khalil, Aiman, Soursou, Georgia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-03-2019
• Subjects: Access control; Algorithms; Artificial intelligence; Blockchain; Clinical decision making; Cryptography; Cybersecurity; Data management; Data retrieval; data-sharing; Dermatology; distributed ledger technology; distributed systems; Financial management; Food processing; Health care; health information exchange, security, interoperability; healthcare, biomedical; Information sharing; Medical diagnosis; medicine; Monitoring systems; Patients; Personal health; Privacy; Reforming; transparency
• ISSN: 2410-387X; 2410-387X
• DOI: 10.3390/cryptography3010003

Blockchain technology has gained considerable attention, with an escalating interest in a plethora of numerous applications, ranging from data management, financial services, cyber security, IoT, and food science to healthcare industry and brain research. There has been a remarkable interest witnessed in utilizing applications of blockchain for the delivery of safe and secure healthcare data management. Also, blockchain is reforming the traditional healthcare practices to a more reliable means, in terms of effective diagnosis and treatment through safe and secure data sharing. In the future, blockchain could be a technology that may potentially help in personalized, authentic, and secure healthcare by merging the entire real-time clinical data of a patient’s health and presenting it in an up-to-date secure healthcare setup. In this paper, we review both the existing and latest developments in the field of healthcare by implementing blockchain as a model. We also discuss the applications of blockchain, along with the challenges faced and future perspectives.