Blockchain in the Healthcare Sector

Introduction

Health is the key to an active and happy life. Modern society has benefited from enormous technological development in improving healthcare. With each new technology, more solutions to existing health problems become feasible (Bartoletti, 2019). Indeed, some recent technologies, inclusing the Internet of things, machine learning, image processing, big data, and blockchain, allow researchers to resolve previously unreachable health problems. However, the massive data collected in healthcare may produce serious problems. The enormous amount of data is circulated with limited access and cannot be easily used for computational methods. In addition, some records still need to be completed. Therefore, it is impossible to perform the complex data analysis needed to get the appropriate solutions (Tortorella, 2020). To address these fundamental challenges in the healthcare sector, researchers are focusing on the following main parts (Thapa & Camtepe, 2021):

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  Data Integrity (Pandey et al., 2020; Zarour et al., 2021): It is a persistent challenge in today's healthcare sector. Data integrity ensures that available data is correct, and his data cannot be improperly changed. Incorrect data can pose serious health risks to patients and impose enormous responsibility on clinicians. It can lead to a variety of issues, including misconduct and poor treatment. This type of risky scenario makes handling healthcare data extremely difficult.

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  Data security and Privacy (Dasgupta et al., 2016): The last years have witnessed an enormous appearance of stubbornly developed threats and targeted attacks against information systems. The main goal of these attacks was to export recoverable data by the attacker. Thus, data protection is considered a growing problem in the healthcare sector. This problem challenges the healthcare industry to address these various complementary and critical issues (Abouelmehdi, et al., 2017):

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    Data security governs data access during the lifecycle of data.

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    Data privacy determines who has access to data according to specific privacy policies. This data may include personal, medical or professional information. A major part of these information can be classified as confidential information.

Blockchain is a new data storage technique that makes the modification, hacking, and defrauding of data within the system very difficult or impossible. A blockchain can be considered as a set of digital transactions that have been reproduced and spread on the whole associated network of computer systems (Zheng et al., 2017). The chain contains several blocks. Each block may include several transactions. When a new transaction appears on the chain, a new block associated with this transaction will be created and added to the chain. The distributed ledger technology is used in the decentralized database operated by multiple participants (DLT). Blockchain technology belongs to distributed ledger technology. Each transaction in the blockchain has an immutable cryptographic signature called a hash (Yli-Humo et al., 2016).

Blockchain has recently been used to create valuable solutions in a variety of industries. Recently, it has been integrated into the healthcare sector in many countries. The objective of using blockchain is to maintain and share patient data between different stakeholders such as doctors, insurance companies, hospitals, clinics, and laboratories. Blockchain technology may aid in solving serious challenges in the healthcare field. As a result, it can improve the precision, safety, and transparency of health information distributed and communicated within the network associated with the healthcare system (Haleem et al., 2021).