Blockchain distributed ledger technologies for biomedical and health care applications

Abstract

ObjectivesTo introduce blockchain technologies, including their benefits, pitfalls, and the latest applications, to the biomedical and health care domains.Target AudienceBiomedical and health care informatics researchers who would like to learn about blockchain technologies and their applications in the biomedical/health care domains.ScopeThe covered topics include: (1) introduction to the famous Bitcoin crypto-currency and the underlying blockchain technology; (2) features of blockchain; (3) review of alternative blockchain technologies; (4) emerging nonfinancial distributed ledger technologies and applications; (5) benefits of blockchain for biomedical/health care applications when compared to traditional distributed databases; (6) overview of the latest biomedical/health care applications of blockchain technologies; and (7) discussion of the potential challenges and proposed solutions of adopting blockchain technologies in biomedical/health care domains.

Pragmatic, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology: Paving the Future for Healthcare

“…(1) what problem(s) the blockchain-enabled solution is designed to solve; (2) which usecases are in scope of this solution, and; (3) what is the minimally required scope of data to be collected and processed throughout these usecases (i.e., Data Minimization Principle). Limiting the scope of data stored on a blockchain serves to comply with data protection directives such as the European Union's (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as achieving desired performance of the system.…”

“…Respectively, each processing node reaches its own conclusions, and then votes on those conclusions to verify that the majority are in consensus. 3 Several clear differences exist between DLT and traditional database technology as they were designed to support fundamentally different hypotheses of access to and control of assets. First, in traditional information technology (IT) architectures, each organization manages and secures its own data; blockchain and DLTs represent a departure from this approach.…”

Ontology of Blockchain Technologies. Principles of Identification and Classification

“…In the 21st century, the blockchain technologies will athwart affect all business areas: financial services (Alvseike and Iversen, 2017;Scott, 2016;Evans, 2015;Quintana Diaz, 2014), IoT (Boudguiga et al, 2017;Dorri et al, 2017), consumer electronics (Andrews et al, 2017), insurances (Mainelli and von Gunten, 2014;ste, 2016), energy industry, logistics (Badzar, 2016;Hackius and Petersen, 2017), transportation, media (Kotobi and Bilén, 2017), communications (Plant et al, 2017), (Chakravorty and Rong, 2017), entertainment, healthcare (Kuo et al, 2017), automation, and robotics will be involved. After the advent of Internet, it currently represents the most prominent technology and it will shape the upcoming products and services in every industry field.…”

A Blockchain-Based Notarization Service for Biomedical Knowledge Retrieval

“…Currently, there is considerable optimism that blockchain technology will revolutionize the healthcare industry [19], and there are review articles that thoroughly describe the advantages and challenges of using blockchain technologies in the biomedical domain ([20,21]). Major advantages include [20] the ability to support (a) decentralized data management (e.g.…”

“…Major advantages include [20] the ability to support (a) decentralized data management (e.g. when different healthcare stakeholders need to access patient data); (b) immutable audit trails, implementing the only read and write function for medical data preventing tampering; (c) data provenance, where the origins of the data are traceable, e.g.…”