Blockchain for applications of clinical trials: Taxonomy, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

Patient enrollment, data sharing, and data privacy are enormous medical challenges for clinical trial studies. In recent years, blockchain technology has drawn the attention of various researchers and institutes. As a new and innovative distributed ledger technology, blockchain can be critical to addressing these challenges, thus making clinical research transparent and building public trust fairly and openly. However, the existing literature lacks a comprehensive survey on the adoption of blockchain in clinical trials. To fill the research void, this paper presents a punctilious taxonomy of blockchain technology in clinical trials according to the literature. This taxonomy comprises decentralized scenarios, decentralized practices, blockchain types, deployment methods, and consensus algorithms. The results show that blockchain technology can cover all aspects of the clinical trial study in a decentralized, secure, transparent manner. Besides, some open research challenges of blockchain are categorized into three groups: technical challenges, security challenges, and organizational challenges. Moreover, some recent blockchain projects, micro applications in clinical trials, and several research areas or technologies for future research and development are discussed.