Part 2: Blockchain technology in health care

Abstract

Blockchain technology is one of the many disruptive technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that will irrevocably change the way we live and work. These technologies are well embedded in the areas of global finance, health care and defence, to name a few. This review focuses on the relevance of blockchain technology to health care. Blockchain technology will be the unifying platform for sharing patient data currently inaccessible due to the siloed architecture of legacy software systems, and as a result potentially be the basis for precision or individualized patient treatment. It will also strengthen digital security of sensitive patient data that is presently a lucrative target for cyber criminals. In the current COVID-19 environment, clinicians will rely more on telehealth to reduce person-to-person contact. This service can be delivered by the clinical team with confidence in the veracity of the patient data made accessible through the blockchain platform. Smart contracts written on the blockchain platform will reduce the possibility of international humanitarian aid to low-and middle-income countries being misspent. The pharmaceutical supply chain industry is adopting blockchain technology to ensure supply chain provenance. Similarly, the health insurance industry recognizes how the blockchain ecosystem can improve services to its members and expedite reimbursements to clinicians.

A collaborative approach to maintaining optimal inventory and mitigating stockout risks during a pandemic: capabilities for enabling health-care supply chain resilience

“…The article highlights the importance of both risk and benefit sharing, while several other articles refer to only one side of the capability, usually the benefit such as profit sharing to mitigate sourcing risks among partnering firms (Zhang et al , 2013). Sharing blockchain technology is viewed as a benefit because it is a unifying platform for sharing patient data inaccessible due to the siloed architecture (Drosatos and Kaldoudi, 2019; Tan et al , 2020). The final capability, collaborative performance systems, was not identified at all; however, there were 46 articles relating collaboration and HCSC performance.…”

A systematic review of digital technology and innovation and its potential to address anti-corruption, transparency, and accountability in the pharmaceutical supply chain

“…The last technology category identified in this review made up a large volume of studies but remains a relatively newer technology solution. This group of articles discussed the potential role for blockchain-based solutions that use distributed ledger technology to optimize the pharmaceutical supply chain and procurement process [37,64,72,[82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89] (see Table 5 for examples). Blockchain is an emerging technology type, with its primary popularity in Fintech, cryptocurrency, and non-fungible token (NFT) applications, but has also seen widespread interest for business and private network applications, including from the pharmaceutical sector [86].…”

Development and Pilot-Test of Blockchain-Based MyHealthData Platform

“…When applying the blockchain to the data subject's consent in relation to personal information protection, security can be guaranteed with a private key encryption signature method and each document can be uniquely identified by a hash. It also means that once all parties have agreed, the document cannot be changed at will [15,16].…”