Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia.
Department of Computing, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, Tanjong Malim, Malaysia.
J Med Syst. 2019 Sep 14;43(10):320. doi: 10.1007/s10916-019-1445-8.
Blockchain in healthcare applications requires robust security and privacy mechanism for high-level authentication, interoperability and medical records sharing to comply with the strict legal requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Blockchain technology in the healthcare industry has received considerable research attention in recent years. This study conducts a review to substantially analyse and map the research landscape of current technologies, mainly the use of blockchain in healthcare applications, into a coherent taxonomy. The present study systematically searches all relevant research articles on blockchain in healthcare applications in three accessible databases, namely, ScienceDirect, IEEE and Web of Science, by using the defined keywords 'blockchain', 'healthcare' and 'electronic health records' and their variations. The final set of collected articles related to the use of blockchain in healthcare application is divided into three categories. The first category includes articles (i.e. 43/58 scientific articles) that attempted to develop and design healthcare applications integrating blockchain, particularly those on new architecture, system designs, framework, scheme, model, platform, approach, protocol and algorithm. The second category includes studies (i.e., 6/58 scientific articles) that attempted to evaluate and analyse the adoption of blockchain in the healthcare system. Finally, the third category comprises review and survey articles (i.e., 6/58 scientific articles) related to the integration of blockchain into healthcare applications. The final articles for review are discussed on the basis of five aspects: (1) year of publication, (2) nationality of authors, (3) publishing house or journal, (4) purpose of using blockchain in health applications and the corresponding contributions and problem types and proposed solutions. Additionally, this study provides identified motivations, open challenges and recommendations on the use of blockchain in healthcare applications. The current research contributes to the literature by providing a detailed review of feasible alternatives and identifying the research gaps. Accordingly, researchers and developers are provided with appealing opportunities to further develop decentralised healthcare applications through a comprehensive discussion of about the importance of blockchain and its integration into various healthcare applications.
区块链在医疗保健应用中需要强大的安全性和隐私机制，以实现高级认证、互操作性和医疗记录共享，从而符合 1996 年《健康保险流通与责任法案》的严格法律要求。近年来，区块链技术在医疗保健行业受到了相当多的研究关注。本研究进行了一次综述，对当前技术（主要是区块链在医疗保健应用中的使用）的研究领域进行了实质性分析和映射，并将其纳入一个连贯的分类法中。本研究系统地在三个可访问的数据库（ScienceDirect、IEEE 和 Web of Science）中搜索了所有关于区块链在医疗保健应用中的相关研究文章，使用了定义的关键字“区块链”、“医疗保健”和“电子健康记录”及其变体。与区块链在医疗保健应用中的使用相关的最终文章集分为三类。第一类包括试图开发和设计集成区块链的医疗保健应用的文章（即 43/58 篇科学文章），特别是那些关于新架构、系统设计、框架、方案、模型、平台、方法、协议和算法的文章。第二类包括试图评估和分析区块链在医疗保健系统中的采用情况的研究（即 6/58 篇科学文章）。最后，第三类包括与区块链集成到医疗保健应用相关的综述和调查文章（即 6/58 篇科学文章）。综述的最终文章基于以下五个方面进行了讨论：（1）发表年份，（2）作者的国籍，（3）出版单位或期刊，（4）在健康应用中使用区块链的目的及相应的贡献，（5）问题类型和提出的解决方案。此外，本研究还提供了在医疗保健应用中使用区块链的确定动机、开放挑战和建议。本研究通过对可行替代方案进行详细审查，并确定研究空白，为文献做出了贡献。因此，研究人员和开发人员通过全面讨论区块链的重要性及其在各种医疗保健应用中的集成，为进一步开发去中心化医疗保健应用提供了有吸引力的机会。
