A Review of Blockchain for Secure Patient Data in Healthcare

There are many hurdles that the healthcare industry goes through to protect patient data, which is always required since healthcare data is very sensitive. Blockchain technology is quite effective for maintaining data’s perpetual integrities and privacies. This paper aims to analyse the applicability of the blockchain concept in the healthcare sector, where the emphasis is made on the technical ability of the idea to facilitate secure and comprehensive decentralised information management for patients. The first part of the paper introduces the topic and considers the growing need for secure data handling in healthcare. The second part provides an overview of the related studies and the development of blockchain solutions. A brief explanation of how the blockchain algorithms work is given, and then the different potential uses of blockchain in healthcare are discussed, such as in EHR and medical supply chain. The descriptive architecture of blockchain in the healthcare domain is also discussed, and then the implementation issues of the technology domain are explained. Lastly, the paper looks at the future direction and possible advancement concerning the use of blockchain in the health sector. The research analyses reveal that blockchain should be implemented to improve data protection, share, reuse, and identifiability of patient data with immense opportunities to increase the quality of patients’ treatment and healthcare organisation effectiveness shortly.