Blockchain Technologies: Opportunities for Solving Real-World Problems in Healthcare and Biomedical Sciences

Blockchain technology is associated with the financial industry, but it can be applied to other industries. The supporting architecture of blockchain has the immense potential to transform the delivery of healthcare, medical, clinical, and life sciences, due to the extended functionality and distinct features of its distributed ledger. The potential scale of impact is comparable to that seen with the introduction of TCP/IP. Blockchain technology has captured the interest of healthcare providers and biomedical scientists within various healthcare domains such as longitudinal healthcare records, automated claims, drug development, interoperability in population health, consumer health, patient portals, medical research, data security, and reducing costs with supply chain management. It is not yet clear if blockchain is going to disrupt healthcare, but healthcare organizations are monitoring its potential closely for prospective concepts like secure patient IDs. Realistically, the adoption and implementation of blockchains will be a gradual evolution over time, but now is the time to take a fresh look at its possibilities in healthcare and biomedical sciences. Blockchain technology revolutionary solutions are bringing us closer to the possibility of every patient record being able to send updates to an open-source, community-wide trusted ledger that is accessible and understood across organizations with guaranteed integrity.

This paper discusses as a review some potential areas of opportunity for blockchain in the health and biomedical sciences fields.

This paper describes and synthesizes 20 examples of real-world use-case scenarios for blockchains in healthcare and biomedical practice.