Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Dec 2, 2019
Date Accepted: Sep 28, 2021
The Usability of Blockchain Technology in the Healthcare Sector: a Systematic Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Blockchain technology is a part of Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0)new Internet of Things (IoT) application of decentralised, distributed ledgers, immutable and cryptographically secure technology. This technology entails a series of transactions list with identical copies shared and retained by different group or parties. One field where blockchain technology has tremendous potential is healthcare, due to a more patient-centric approach to the healthcare system and to connect disparate systems and increase the accuracy of electronic healthcare records.
Objective:
We aimed to systematically review study on the usability of blockchain technology in healthcare and to analyse the characteristics of the usability study that have implemented on blockchain technology.
Methods:
This study used systematic review methodology, where the existing literature related to the usability aspect of blockchain technology in healthcare was included. Relevant articles were searched using Pubmed, Springerlink, IEEE Xplore, Embase, Scopus and EBSCOHost. Quality assessment of literature was performed on the selected 22 articles by assessing the trustworthiness and relevance.
Results:
After the full screening, 22 articles were included. Table of evidence was constructed and interpretation of the results of the selected articles was done. The results of scoring for measuring the quality of the publication were obtained and interpreted, where a total of 3 (14%) high quality paper, 9 (41%) moderate quality papers and 10 (45%) low quality papers were identified.
Conclusions:
Blockchain technology was found to be useful in real healthcare environment mainly on the management of electronic medical records, biomedical research and education, remote patient monitoring, pharmaceutical supply chain, health insurance claims, health data analytics and some other potential area. The main reason for the implementation of blockchain technology in healthcare sector was identified, namely data integrity, access control, data logging, data versioning and non-repudiation. The findings could help the scientific community to understand the usability aspect of blockchain technology. The results from this study help to recognise the accessibility as well as the usability of blockchain technology in the healthcare sector.
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