Tracing the Blockchain Challenges in Healthcare: A Topic Modeling and Bibliometric Analysis

The application of blockchain technology to healthcare offers promise in providing solutions to some key challenges related to data sharing, privacy, security, and access control. However, several barriers prevent the widespread adoption of blockchain and prompted research efforts. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of 196 documents indexed in the Scopus database to examine their structure, impact, contributors, and journals. The bibliometric analysis provides information on the publication and citation structure, as well as the most productive authors, universities, countries, journals, and most cited studies. In addition, it identifies the most prevalent keywords and their co-occurrence patterns on blockchain challenges in healthcare. A topic modeling approach, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), is also employed to reveal the latent topical structure of this literature. As a result of these findings, the research landscape in this area has been quantitatively analyzed, identifying six critical challenges regarding the use of blockchain in healthcare: data privacy/security, integration with smart devices, interoperability, scalability, governance, and cost.