Leveraging Blockchain Technology for Indian Healthcare system: An assessment using value-focused thinking approach

Abstract

Indian Healthcare system is a complex and distinguished structure due to variety of factors viz. population size it serves, presence of organized and unorganized services of healthcare, economic disparity and governance structure among others. Extant research emphasizes on the aspects like transparency, trust, disintermediation, non-repudiation, benchmarking of processes and practices, traceability and data integrity among others to stimulate the Indian Healthcare system for an improvised and more effective format. Blockchain Technology is recent innovation that offers many of these aforementioned aspects as a feature to the host systems. However, it is critical to understand and articulate the utility of Blockchain Technology specific to the Indian Healthcare system. Further, it is important to gauge the requirement elicitation of key stakeholders for Blockchain Technology adoption in Indian Healthcare system w.r.t any attribute prioritization/customization or design considerations (Consensus mechanism, type of blockchain, smart contracts etc.). There have been some research works on aspects of Blockchain applications in Indian Healthcare but lack a strong perspective of stakeholder requirements. We use Value-Focused Thinking framework based on discussions with the stakeholders to address the above mentioned research premise. We identify Fundamental Objectives and Strategic Objectives from the stakeholder interactions that contribute to the strategic goal. This is a niche work with a significant analytical contribution from the information systems perspective of Blockchain Technology adoption in the Indian Healthcare ecosystem given the light of premises from realms of human agents, behavioural and applications requirement from a stakeholder viewpoint.