Abstract
There has been an increasing interest in blockchain technology from the health care sector in the last couple of years. The value proposition for using blockchain technology in the health care sector is to share sensitive patient data among health care entities securely and to empower patients. Blockchain technology allows patients to have an active role in developing and updating their own patient data. However, is blockchain technology really the silver bullet it seems to be? With this paper, we aim to understand the benefits and challenges of blockchain technology in the health care sector. We discuss innovation and security implications concerning blockchain technology in health care. Furthermore, we show that there is a need for more use cases to ensure the secure sharing of data within the health care sector. In our opinion, blockchain technology will not solve the issues encountered by the health care sector; in fact, it may raise more issues than it will solve.
Highlights
Beyond its first application as the peer-to-peer payment system Bitcoin, blockchain technology is anticipated to revolutionize industries and sectors [1,2]
The common use cases that benefit from blockchain-based solutions for a patient-centric health care information system include patient-managed health records, enhanced insurance claim processes, enhanced health care research, and advanced medical records shared among patients and health care providers [11]
Throughout this paper, we have presented and discussed various views on blockchain technology and the positive and negative issues related to it
Summary
Beyond its first application as the peer-to-peer payment system Bitcoin, blockchain technology is anticipated to revolutionize industries and sectors [1,2]. Stuart Haber and W Scott Stornetta invented the notion behind blockchain first, when they proposed a framework for a “timestamping digital document” to calculate hash values that uniquely identify documents and save them in certificates with a timestamp [22]. These documents are linked by a data structure with the hashes of previous records. Bitcoin became commonly known as a means for trading with cryptocurrency [23]
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