Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: May 19, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 2, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 9, 2020
The crisis of trust in COVID-19 pandemic: can blockchain technology help?
ABSTRACT
Background:
The widespread death and disruption caused by COVID-19 pandemic has unraveled the failure of existing institutions to protect the health and well-being of humanity. Lack of accurate and timely data along with pervasive misinformation is causing even more devastation.
Objective:
This paper describes how blockchain with its distributed trust networks may provide solutions to these informatics problems.
Methods:
Blockchain is being applied in innovative ways that are relevant to the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. We give examples of blockchain applications for supply chain, financial transactions, public health, credentialing, contact tracing, identity management, and data analysis.
Results:
This review of existing and potential applications of blockchain technology in healthcare identifies a need to launch a national policy agenda to apply blockchain for addressing the failures of existing systems to fight COVID-19. It also suggests a not centralized governance structure in the form of blockchain consortia to avoid political and bureaucratic considerations adversely impacting future response. A partnership of academia, researchers, business, and industry is needed to expedite the adoption of blockchain in healthcare.
Conclusions:
In summary, blockchain relies on a distributed, robust, secure, privacy-preserving, and immutable record keeping framework that can transform the nature of trust, value sharing, and transactions for the better. COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to use this remarkable technology for serving humanity.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.