Blockchain and emerging technologies for next generation secure healthcare: A comprehensive survey of applications, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

Faced with multiple societal challenges, the healthcare sector has been compelled to leverage recent and emerging technologies to adapt. Blockchain is one of the leading technologies, offering transparency, process automation, immutability of traces and the ability to scale up in terms of both the volume of processes and the number of players interacting. The goal of the paper is to show the potential of blockchain technology - alone or merged with other technologies - to help the healthcare system evolve and provide scalable, efficient and secure solutions to four healthcare applications: electronic health record (EHR) storage, health data sharing, remote patient monitoring, and pharmaceutical supply chains. After identifying the functional and security requirements of healthcare systems, the paper conducts an in-depth review of the literature. The survey assesses the effectiveness of blockchain-based solutions in meeting functional, privacy and security needs. It is completed by an analysis of the synergies that can be expected between blockchain and emerging technologies, e.g. artificial intelligence, federated learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Large Language Models (LLM), to the benefit of security or privacy in healthcare.