Moray College, University of the Highlands and Islands, Elgin, IV30 1JJ, Scotland, UK.
Lipscomb University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Nashville, TN, 37204-3951, USA.
Int J Health Geogr. 2018 Jul 5;17(1):25. doi: 10.1186/s12942-018-0144-x.
A PubMed query run in June 2018 using the keyword 'blockchain' retrieved 40 indexed papers, a reflection of the growing interest in blockchain among the medical and healthcare research and practice communities. Blockchain's foundations of decentralisation, cryptographic security and immutability make it a strong contender in reshaping the healthcare landscape worldwide. Blockchain solutions are currently being explored for: (1) securing patient and provider identities; (2) managing pharmaceutical and medical device supply chains; (3) clinical research and data monetisation; (4) medical fraud detection; (5) public health surveillance; (6) enabling truly public and open geo-tagged data; (7) powering many Internet of Things-connected autonomous devices, wearables, drones and vehicles, via the distributed peer-to-peer apps they run, to deliver the full vision of smart healthy cities and regions; and (8) blockchain-enabled augmented reality in crisis mapping and recovery scenarios, including mechanisms for validating, crediting and rewarding crowdsourced geo-tagged data, among other emerging use cases. Geospatially-enabled blockchain solutions exist today that use a crypto-spatial coordinate system to add an immutable spatial context that regular blockchains lack. These geospatial blockchains do not just record an entry's specific time, but also require and validate its associated proof of location, allowing accurate spatiotemporal mapping of physical world events. Blockchain and distributed ledger technology face similar challenges as any other technology threatening to disintermediate legacy processes and commercial interests, namely the challenges of blockchain interoperability, security and privacy, as well as the need to find suitable and sustainable business models of implementation. Nevertheless, we expect blockchain technologies to get increasingly powerful and robust, as they become coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) in various real-word healthcare solutions involving AI-mediated data exchange on blockchains.
2018 年 6 月，使用“blockchain”一词在 PubMed 上进行查询，检索到 40 篇索引论文，这反映了医疗和医疗保健研究和实践界对区块链日益增长的兴趣。区块链的去中心化、加密安全性和不可篡改性使其成为重塑全球医疗保健格局的有力竞争者。区块链解决方案目前正在探索用于：（1）保护患者和提供者的身份；（2）管理药品和医疗器械供应链；（3）临床研究和数据货币化；（4）医疗欺诈检测；（5）公共卫生监测；（6）实现真正的公共和开放地理标记数据；（7）通过其运行的分布式对等应用程序为许多物联网连接的自治设备、可穿戴设备、无人机和车辆提供动力，以提供智能健康城市和地区的全部愿景；（8）在危机测绘和恢复场景中启用区块链增强现实，包括验证、信任和奖励众包地理标记数据的机制，以及其他新兴用例。目前存在启用地理空间的区块链解决方案，使用加密空间坐标系添加常规区块链缺乏的不可变空间上下文。这些地理空间区块链不仅记录条目的特定时间，还要求并验证其相关位置证明，从而允许对物理世界事件进行精确的时空映射。区块链和分布式账本技术面临着与任何其他威胁要去中介化传统流程和商业利益的技术类似的挑战，即区块链互操作性、安全性和隐私性的挑战，以及寻找合适和可持续的实施商业模式的需求。然而，我们预计区块链技术将变得越来越强大和稳健，因为它们与人工智能（AI）在各种涉及 AI 介导的数据在区块链上交换的现实世界医疗保健解决方案中结合使用。
