Healthcare is a data-intensive clinical domain where a huge amount of data is generated, accessed, and disseminated on a regular basis. Existing approaches in healthcare systems such as tracking and tracing are regularly exposing the system’s limitations in managing the security and privacy of the patients’ data. The majority of the work in healthcare systems involves exchanging or using potentially personal and confidential data. A key problem is the creation of approaches that maintain the utility of health data while preserving privacy and conforming to high ethical standards. This will be vital to fostering large-scale uptake, particularly as health data collection is likely to continue beyond this current ongoing pandemic. Therefore, the research community is investigating secure, privacy-preserving, and sustainable healthcare systems, through the use of emerging technology such as blockchain.
Blockchain technology has emerged as a key technology in the digital revolution of many verticals such as supply chains, automobile industry, and healthcare. It is ready to transform the way traditional medical systems and businesses have engaged in the healthcare sector for the last several decades. Blockchain applications for healthcare data management create utilities for patient, doctors and healthcare institutes for management of patient records, claims and payments management, medical IoT security and data verification and exchange for financial auditing with transparency. This also enables healthcare institutions to restrict the unauthorized person to access sensitive information and to maintain immutable audit trails of access and modification to patient data. The purpose of this special issue is to explore blockchain to improve processes, services and applications in healthcare, health sciences and health education.
Access the full description here.