Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 14, 2020
Date Accepted: May 13, 2020
Blockchain Technology in Patient Care: Current State of Research, Challenges and Future Research Directions
ABSTRACT
Background:
Blockchain offers a promising new distributed technology to address the challenges of data standardization, system interoperability and accessibility of medical records.
Objective:
The purpose of this review is to survey and analyze the current literature regarding the application of Blockchain technology in health care to broadly determine the Blockchain opportunities for patient care that health researchers are pursuing and the associated challenges.
Methods:
This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. We queried the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PubMed, Embase, and the Web of Science databases for peer-reviewed research articles published up to December 2019 that examined the implementation of Blockchain technology in health care settings.
Results:
Applying a patient care focus, we identified three main categories of Blockchain research in health care: data privacy and security, interoperability and health care outcomes. Blockchain based health care applications include medical information systems, personal health records, mHealth and telemedicine, data preservation systems and social networks, health information exchanges and remote monitoring systems, and medical research systems. These Blockchain based health care applications may improve patient engagement and empowerment, health care provider access to information, and enhance the use of health care information for medical research.
Conclusions:
Blockchain provides benefits such as ensuring the data privacy and security of health data, facilitating interoperability of heterogeneous HIT systems and improving the quality of health care outcomes. However, barriers for using Blockchain technology to build HIT include security and privacy vulnerabilities, user resistance, high computing power requirements and implementation costs, inefficient consensus algorithms and challenges of integrating Blockchain with existing HIT. Though Blockchain presents significant potential for disrupting health care, most ideas are in their infancy. Therefore, more research is needed to evaluate the impact of Blockchain technology post implementation.
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Copyright
© 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.