Introducing blockchains for healthcare

Abstract

Blockchains as a technology emerged to facilitate money exchange transactions and eliminate the need for a trusted third party to notarize and verify such transactions as well as protect data security and privacy. New structures of Blockchains have been designed to accommodate the need for this technology in other fields such as e-health, tourism and energy. This paper is concerned with the use of Blockchains in managing and sharing electronic health and medical records to allow patients, hospitals, clinics, and other medical stakeholder to share data amongst themselves, and increase interoperability. The selection of the Blockchains used architecture depends on the entities participating in the constructed chain network. Although the use of Blockchains may reduce redundancy and provide caregivers with consistent records about their patients, it still comes with few challenges which could infringe patients' privacy, or potentially compromise the whole network of stakeholders. In this paper, we investigate different Blockchains structures, look at existing challenges and provide possible solutions. We focus on challenges that may expose patients' privacy and the resiliency of Blockchains to possible attacks.