Blockchain in Healthcare: The Past, the Present and the Future

A special issue of Information (ISSN 2078-2489). This special issue belongs to the section "Information Processes".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2024) | Viewed by 4324

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of International Management, Modul University Vienna, 1190 Vienna, Austria
Interests: blockchain; distributed ledger technology; digital transformation; tokenization; token economy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Interests: blockchain; distributed ledger technology; innovation in healthcare; digital transformation in healthcare; digital health technology

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Guest Editor
Logistics and Information Systems, Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, 75006 Paris, France
Interests: blockchain; distributed ledger technology; innovation in healthcare; digital transformation in healthcare; digital health technology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The MDPI journal Information invites submissions for a Special Issue entitled “Blockchain in Healthcare: The Past, the Present and the Future”. The application of blockchain technologies in the healthcare system has gained substantial interest in recent years. Researchers have identified numerous areas in which distributed ledger technology (including blockchain) can help to make the current medical system more effective and efficient. These include topics such as security, disintermediation, contact tracing, patients’ self-management of data, home monitoring, interoperability, and medical product supply chain. However, research also highlights numerous challenges that need to be overcome, including the complexity of introducing blockchain-based applications, incumbents’ resistance to change the current system, regulatory concerns, and privacy threats.

The aim of this Special Issue is to provide a broad forum for the discussion of timely topics surrounding blockchain application in healthcare. Due to the rapidly evolving technical and legal environments in which blockchain is being implemented and regulated, there is a need to update published research in this area. We invite conceptual papers, design science research, literature reviews, case studies, and empirical qualitative and quantitative studies that contribute new knowledge to the field.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

*) Practical use cases for blockchain in healthcare

*) Blockchain adoption strategies and barriers in healthcare

*) The impact of blockchain solutions on various stakeholders including governments

*) Privacy and security issues of electronic health records (EHRs) and patient-generated data (PGD)

*) Overview of current research clusters in blockchain and healthcare

*) Ethical issues of blockchain in healthcare

*) Token economics in healthcare

*) Technical and social issues related to blockchain governance

*) Examples of blockchain use for medical products and pharmaceutical supply chain

*) Blockchain education and workforce implications for healthcare professionals

Prof. Dr. Horst Treiblmaier
Dr. Anjum Khurshid
Dr. Rami Alkhudary
Guest Editors

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • blockchain
  • distributed ledger technology
  • decentralized storage
  • smart contracts
  • Hyperledger
  • healthcare
  • digital transformation in healthcare
  • adoption of blockchain in healthcare
  • consensus mechanisms
  • governance

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

23 pages, 5503 KiB  
Article
Enhancing Healthcare Management during COVID-19: A Patient-Centric Architectural Framework Enabled by Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain
by Sabita Khatri, Khalil al-Sulbi, Abdulaziz Attaallah, Md Tarique Jamal Ansari, Alka Agrawal and Rajeev Kumar
Information 2023, 14(8), 425; https://doi.org/10.3390/info14080425 - 26 Jul 2023
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2667
Abstract
The highly transmissible COVID-19 virus has wreaked havoc on the global economy, health, and lives. The abrupt burst and exponential spread of this pandemic has shown the inadequacies of existing healthcare institutions in handling a public health emergency. As governments around the world [...] Read more.
The highly transmissible COVID-19 virus has wreaked havoc on the global economy, health, and lives. The abrupt burst and exponential spread of this pandemic has shown the inadequacies of existing healthcare institutions in handling a public health emergency. As governments around the world strive to re-establish their economies, open workplaces, ensure safe journeys, and return to regular life, they require solutions to reduce losses. The proposed framework provides virtual assistance from various medical practitioners and physicians. Furthermore, it promotes the accuracy of information gathered from COVID-19 patients, which can aid in the launch of a variety of government decisions and public guidelines aimed at combating health exigencies. The authors present a revolutionary blockchain-based solution that builds trust between the medical professionals and patients while preventing accidental coronavisrus transmission. This solution also keeps track of COVID-19 patients and improves EHR management, which can be a viable solution for common EHR challenges such as lowering the risk of patient data loss, maintaining privacy and security, and obtaining immutable consensus on the maintenance of health records, gaps in hospital communication, and inefficient clinical data retrieval methods. This research work describes a COVID-19 patient-centric blockchain-based EHR employing JavaScript-based smart contracts for a decentralized healthcare management system. The proposed Hyperledger fabric and a Composer-based working prototype ensure the model’s security and the authenticity of the health records. The authors used the Hyperledger Caliper benchmarking tool, which measures latency, throughput, resource utilization, etc., under different conditions and control parameters. The findings highlight the importance of the proposed blockchain-enabled architecture in revolutionizing healthcare administration during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, promoting enhanced clinical outcomes and supporting patient-centered care. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain in Healthcare: The Past, the Present and the Future)
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