Implementing Blockchains for Efficient Health Care: Systematic Review

Abstract

Background The decentralized nature of sensitive health information can bring about situations where timely information is unavailable, worsening health outcomes. Furthermore, as patient involvement in health care increases, there is a growing need for patients to access and control their data. Blockchain is a secure, decentralized online ledger that could be used to manage electronic health records (EHRs) efficiently, therefore with the potential to improve health outcomes by creating a conduit for interoperability. Objective This study aimed to perform a systematic review to assess the feasibility of blockchain as a method of managing health care records efficiently. Methods Reviewers identified studies via systematic searches of databases including PubMed, MEDLINE, Scopus, EMBASE, ProQuest, and Cochrane Library. Suitability for inclusion of each was assessed independently. Results Of the 71 included studies, the majority discuss potential benefits and limitations without evaluation of their effectiveness, although some systems were tested on live data. Conclusions Blockchain could create a mechanism to manage access to EHRs stored on the cloud. Using a blockchain can increase interoperability while maintaining privacy and security of data. It contains inherent integrity and conforms to strict legal regulations. Increased interoperability would be beneficial for health outcomes. Although this technology is currently unfamiliar to most, investments into creating a sufficiently user-friendly interface and educating users on how best to take advantage of it would lead to improved health outcomes. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) RR2-10.2196/10994

VirusDIP: Virus Data Integration Platform

“…Data security and privacy protection are new challenges while promoting the open sharing the biological big data. Blockchain and secure multi-party computation technology have provided a new technical concept for biological big data governance and applied to medical and genomic data analysis (Ahmad et al, 2019;Bogdanov et al, 2018;Vazirani et al, 2019;Veeningen et al, 2018). Based on Nextstrain (Hadfield et al, 2018) and visualization tools, VirusDIP has deployed Multi-party genome analysis platform for hCoV-19, which is the first hCoV-19 analysis tool based on blockchain and secure multi-party computation in China to our knowledge.…”

Applications of Blockchain Technology for Data-Sharing in Oncology: Results from a Systematic Literature Review

“…Some of these approaches to build blockchain-based EHR or supply chain system can be applied in oncology as well. An interested reader may refer to the recent relevant reviews of using BCT for healthcare [40,41], and in supply chain [42]. However, one has to take into account specifics of the oncology domain, including the chronic nature of cancer and data volumes due to the need to manage radiology images [43].…”

Data Analytics in Smart Healthcare: The Recent Developments and Beyond

“…Detection of dementia (including Alzheimer's disease) [20][21][22] Detection of anxiety [23][24][25] Medicalchain-Blockchain and healthcare [26][27][28] Genetics and genomics [29][30][31] Virtual reality in healthcare [32][33][34] Social media in healthcare [35][36][37] Robotic surgery [38][39][40]…”