Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Feb 6, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 7, 2019 - Apr 4, 2019
Date Accepted: Sep 17, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Exploring the Potential of Blockchain Technology to Meet the Needs of 21st Century Japanese Healthcare
ABSTRACT
Japan is undergoing a major population health transition as its society ages and it continues to experience low birth rates. The “aging Japan” will bring new challenges to its public health system, highlighted as a model for Universal Health Coverage around the world. Specific challenges Japan’s healthcare system will face include an increase in national public health expenditures, higher demand for healthcare services, acute need for elder and long-term care, shortage of healthcare workers, and disparities between healthcare access in rural versus urban areas. Blockchain technology has potential to address some of these challenges, but only if a “health” blockchain is conceptualized, designed, localized, and deployed in a way that is compatible with Japan’s centralized UHC-centric public health system. Blockchain solutions must also be adaptive to opportunities and barriers unique to Japan’s national health and innovation policy, including its regulatory sandbox system, while also seeking to learn from blockchain adoption in the private sector and in other countries. In this viewpoint we identify major opportunities and potential challenges to blockchain adoption for the future of Japan’s healthcare.
Citation
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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.