Blockchain Technology Use Cases in Healthcare Management: State-of-the-Art Framework and Performance Evaluation

The use of blockchain is particularly suited to open-source interoperability outside the financial realm, but the exchange among technology complexities and realistic effects remains unknown. Blockchain is an undoubtedly innovative key technology that, even in various business disciplines, this has captured the attention of scholars and practitioners. Owing to the growing concern of scholarly academics in healthcare, this study sought to identify blockchain technologies with an emphasis on the various medical applications. The results of the comprehensive study show that blockchain has been used to establish advanced and innovative technologies to enhance the existing norms of health information and personal health record (PHR) handling, exchange, and distribution. In the healthcare sector, the deployment of blockchain technology is experiencing a technical transformation in which it has generated substantial value through enhanced performance, authentication, technical innovation, personal privacy, and information management process security. The personal health record and electronic health record show a vital part in helping health patients and providers to subsequent recovery data more efficiently. However, it is difficult to achieve a cohesive understanding of health information that is spread through multiple healthcare professionals. Health reports are typically distributed in various locations in particular and are not synchronized. Electronic health records (EHRs) have developed a common way to preserve and track facts in healthcare for patients. Holding these documents makes the original health information gathering system more reliable and expensive. The EHR is securely housed through using client–server model whereby each patient maintains patient data stewardship. A patient’s records are distributed using focused individual servers between various hospitals. These restrictions place the onus on individualized healthcare whenever it relates to supplying various allied patients and providers with a consistent view and mutual, safe, and private exposure to the clinical records of patients. The blockchain’s availability of data, security, and privacy capabilities have a valuable potential in health, offering alternatives to the existing client–server architectural design EHR management system’s difficulty, secrecy, reliability, integration, and privacy issues. A PHR model uses blockchain technologies and the EHR integration framework to incorporate decentralized health information. Therefore, we adopt the PHR paradigm framework that defines an architecture that facilitates the application of a decentralized and compatible PHR. The efficiency of the PHR blockchain and client–server architecture framework is analyzed and contrasted in this chapter. The results also showed that the underlying shortcomings largely pertain to classification accuracy and also the restrictions and risks related to the implementation. The findings indicate that impressive outcomes can be accomplished in a patient-centered method utilizing the PHR blockchain. In comparison, the permanent and reliable information of patients in the PHR blockchain will benefit advanced health practitioners by deep learning to have improved responses to treatment and diagnostic service. This chapter explores this void from an exploratory viewpoint, evaluating the influence of the PHR blockchain technology on healthcare.