Abstract
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are electronically-stored health information in a digital format. EHRs are typically shared among healthcare stakeholders and face power failure, data misuse, lack of privacy, security, and audit trail. On the other hand, blockchain is the revolutionary invention of the twentieth century that offers a distributed and decentralized setting to communicate among nodes in a list of networks without a central authority. It can address the limitations of EHRs management and provide a safer, secured, and decentralized environment for exchanging EHRs data. Three categories of blockchain-based potential solutions have been proposed by researchers to handle EHRs: conceptual, prototype, and implemented. This study focused on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to find and analyze articles submitted either conceptual or implemented to manage EHRs using blockchain. The study examined 99 papers that were collected from various publication categories. The deep technical analysis focused on evaluating articles based on privacy, security, scalability, accessibility, cost, consensus algorithms, and the type of blockchain used. The SLR found that blockchain technology promises to provide decentralization, security, and privacy that traditional EHRs often lack. Moreover, results obtained from the detailed studies would provide potential researchers with the type of blockchain for future research. Finally, future research directions, in the end, would direct enthusiasm to combine new blockchain-based systems to manage EHRs properly.
Highlights
Blockchain has been a buzzword in Information and Communication Technology industry in recent years
We found that most popular encryption algorithms are Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) [88], Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE) [87], and symmetric encryption (e.g., AES) [11]
LIMITATIONS The Systematic Literature Review (SLR) solely focused on applying blockchain for Electronic Health Records (EHRs) management and did not include any other potential blockchain applications related to other healthcare sectors or any other fields
Summary
Blockchain has been a buzzword in Information and Communication Technology industry in recent years The rise of this new technology has greater potentials to solve data privacy, security, and integrity issues. Both sender and receiver need to depend on a Trusted Third Party (TTP), e.g., bank It involves a few security issues and operational difficulties. Blockchain 4.0: It provides solutions and methods that can meet several business demands of Industry 4.0, which involves automation, resource planning, and integration of various execution programs It requires enhanced trust and privacy which can be met by blockchain. Blockchain technology has great potentials to tackle the pandemic crisis It can help build a decentralized data tracking system that can be retrieved when necessary.
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