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Survey on Blockchain Applications for Healthcare: Reflections and Challenges

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Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2021)

Abstract

Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, public, and digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers. At the top of Blockchain, Ethereum introduces smart contracts to support on-chain storage and enable Decentralized Apps (DApps) to interact with the Blockchain programmatically. In the healthcare domain, programmable Blockchains provide different solutions to resolve some key challenges, such as immutability, security, data provenance, robustness, availability, and privacy. This paper aims to categorize and evaluate different solutions in the healthcare domain that makes use of programmable Blockchain or part of it. We use a software engineering approach to organize the existing 23 papers in multiple categories such as challenges addressed and quality attributes promoted. We will further categorize solutions based on how much they have used Blockchain and show the other research which Blockchain is not recommended to use. This work is intended to provide researchers in the field with a well-defined and structured categorization, plus insights into the existing literature.

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Megha, S. et al. (2021). Survey on Blockchain Applications for Healthcare: Reflections and Challenges. In: Barolli, L., Woungang, I., Enokido, T. (eds) Advanced Information Networking and Applications. AINA 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 227. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75078-7_32

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