Abstract
With the technological sector booming combined with the internet revolutionizing the 21st century, along with the current coronavirus pandemic, more and more hands are getting virtually connected. Today, cyber criminals are not only behind money but are also designed to access, delete, or extort a user's sensitive data. These attacks range from DoS (denial of service) attacks and phishing to eavesdropping attacks. Blockchain is a technology that aims to keep data safe from being corrupted or accidentally deleted while maintaining its history. This technology has an impact on various industries, but the healthcare industry is impacted significantly. This chapter presents a systematic review of different use cases and applications of blockchain in healthcare. This chapter further discusses issues, solutions, and the future scope in blockchain applications in healthcare industries. An idea is to give a complete state of the art and challenges to better understand its utility in the healthcare sector.
Top1. Smart Healthcare And Its Challenges
Smart Healthcare system make use of digital technology such as IOT, wearable devices, cloud services, internet, AI/ML to access information dynamically, connecting people and organisations related to healthcare. This allow fast sharing of data, maintaining of patient history, standardization of data and quick service to the patient. There are certain challenges associated with smart healthcare systems.
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Data Accuracy: The accuracy of data plays a significant role in deciding the quality and kind of treatment for the patient. The health provider will always refer to the data shared by the devices. If the data collected is inaccurate and unauthenticated, this will impact the treatment of the patient.
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Interoperability of data: Data stored using different data structures can result in storing data in varied formats. This will create a hindrance in data sharing among hospitals. Thus, standardization of data using standard data format will allow sharing of data among hospitals and easy for service providers to understand.
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Security of Data: The historical healthcare data should be preserved for malicious attack so that this data may not get altered or deleted. The patient records should remain intact so that right treatment can be given by health providers.
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Data Handling: The healthcare data should be stored, shared, managed and maintained properly so that this data may not get altered or lost.
Top2. Blockchain Basics
Blockchain is a decentralized method of storing data on to blocks. These blocks are linked with one another through a chain. The purpose is to overcome double record problem of a centralized systems. The records in blockchain are timestamped to keep them as a reference during disputes. This technique was developed for secure transmission of data, money, contracts without the involvement of third party. The data stored on a blockchain is difficult to change. It is a software based technology that require internet for running. It comprises of several parts like database, computers and application software.
Figure 1. Chain of Blocks of a Blockchain
Blocks are uniquely identified using a hash. A change in block results in creation of new hash. Each block contains data, hash and hash of previous block. This will not only link blocks together but will also ensure security since change in one block results in change in hash which makes the block invalid in a chain as shown in Figure 1.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Hyperledger: It is an open source project focussed on developing tools and framework for blockchain community.
Contract: It is legal agreement between the two parties.
Security: It is state of being protected.
Cryptography: It is a process of hiding data using some encryption techniques.
Healthcare: Management System: A system that manages healthcare data of patients and hospitals.
Digitization: It is a process of sharing data such as image, audio, text using computers.
Ethereum: It is open source blockchain cryptocurrency exist today.
Consensus: It an open decision agreed by group of people.
Privacy: It’s a right to keep one’s personal information hidden.