The Role of Blockchain Technology in Telehealth and Telemedicine

Abstract

<div><b>Objectives: </b>Telehealth and telemedicine systems aim to deliver remote healthcare services to mitigate the spread of COVID‐19. Also, they can help to manage scarce healthcare resources to control the massive burden of COVID-19 patients in hospitals. However, a large portion of today's telehealth and telemedicine systems are centralized and fall short of providing necessary information security and privacy, operational transparency, health records immutability, and traceability to detect frauds related to patients' insurance claims and physician credentials.</div><div><b>Methods: </b>The current study has explored the potential opportunities and adaptability challenges for blockchain technology in telehealth and telemedicine sector. It has explored the key role that blockchain technology can play to provide necessary information security and privacy, operational transparency, health records immutability, and traceability to detect frauds related to patients' insurance claims and physician credentials.</div><div><b>Results: </b>Blockchain technology can improve telehealth and telemedicine services by offering remote healthcare services in a manner that is decentralized, tamper-proof, transparent, traceable, reliable, trustful, and secure. It enables health professionals to accurately identify frauds related to physician educational credentials and medical testing kits commonly used for home-based diagnosis.</div><div><b>Conclusions: </b>Wide deployment of blockchain in telehealth and telemedicine technology is still in its infancy. Several challenges and research problems need to be resolved to enable the widespread adoption of blockchain technology in telehealth and telemedicine systems.</div><div> </div><div><br></div>

Integration of 5G and Block-Chain Technologies in Smart Telemedicine Using IoT

“…MCC is a balanced metric typically used when the classes have various sizes as given in equation (10). Table 5 shows the obtained experimental results of different classifiers in terms of six measures, namely, accuracy, F-score, AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and Kappa values.…”

“…IoT devices help in capturing patient's data in a continous manner in a user-centric environment and send data to a cloud platofrm for various health applications whichare used for selfmonitoring of patients [8,9]. is goes hand in hand with the concept of Telehealthcare with devices ranging from wearable to talking devices and wireless monitoring services [10,11]. e main benefit of IoT is that it is vital to access information and it helps to avoid an emergency.…”

Blockchain for Waste Management in Smart Cities: A Survey

“…Currently, laws and regulations for blockchain are not mature enough, thereby affecting its adaptability in the waste management industry. Finally, organizational factors such as training facilities, top management support, perceived cost of investment, and available human resources greatly influence the adoption of blockchain into waste management within smart cities [7,51,88].…”

Blockchain for Waste Management in Smart Cities: A Survey

“…For instance, smart contracts are safe against any modification by hackers; but, they cannot be modified by the developers to meet the new business requirements after their deployment. The hackers attempt to manipulate the execution of the smart contracts using loopholes present in smart contracts to execute it in favor of their activities (e.g., stealing the virtual currencies) [65,87,88]. The common vulnerabilities in smart contacts that are often exploited by hackers include reentrance attack, integer overflow, denial of service attacks, and remote code execution.…”

“…Private blockchain platforms run in a controlled environment, thus they are more secure than public blockchain platforms. Private blockchain platforms such as Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Besu [22,88] can preserve the privacy of waste management data through private channels and Orion private transactions manager, respectively.…”