Abstract
The health sector has been a huge market in recent times. It is drawing
minute attention regarding pathological tests, drug manufacturing and supply, clinical
trials and diagnosis by doctors and finally, recovery of patients quickly. The
technologies used in health care for the last decades are redundant. Clinical trials and
diagnoses by doctors can be made more accurate, better and faster with a past medical
history of the patient in hand. Drug manufacturing and distribution can be made
tampered proof and monitored properly by designing a transparent supply management
system for medicine and medical goods. Attempts were made in the past to record the
medical history of patients in a centralized database server, which lacks security,
immutability and consistency of the records. This paper reports a systematic review of
the application of revolutionary and disruptive Blockchain technology in healthcare
systems to address the above issues. Blockchain technology can be used to create
cryptographically immutable, time-stamped, distributed and tamper-proof ledger in a
distributed P2P network to maintain Electronic Health Records (EHR) in the health
care system. This technology removes all intermediaries between the source and
destination point of any transaction. In a Blockchain network, transactions are
cryptographically connected and hence merely difficult to modify the content of any
transaction. This review shows that a number of studies in the past have proposed the
application of Blockchain in health care. However, many of these used cases lack
detailed prototypes and consensus algorithms from an implementation point of view.
The review also highlights and depicts in detail the application of Blockchain in EHR
and medicine supply management systems. The review further highlights the
bottleneck of Blockchain and the area of its research in the near future.