Название: Blockchain Technology in e-Healthcare Management
Автор: Suyel Namasudra, Victor Hugo C. de Albuquerque
Издательство: The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Год: 2023
Страниц: 276
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.2 MB

The healthcare arena has seen a shift in recent years, with more healthcare provisions being delivered or managed via electronic means. Healthcare providers can now provide patients with diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, or a prescription without ever sharing the same physical space. With so much more patient data now stored and accessed electronically, the security of this information is ever more critical to the delivery of effective and efficient healthcare services. As blockchains are resistant to modification of their data, blockchain technology therefore provides traceable and reliable security to e-Healthcare systems and services.

Blockchain is a novel technique to solve these issues, which allows a radical way of executing transactions among several entities, such as businesses, individuals, and machines. Blockchain can be defined as a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that secures and records transactions in a Peer to Peer (P2P) network instead of using single or many servers. Here, each record is saved on many interconnected systems, which keep identical information. In a blockchain network, numerous transactions are grouped into several blocks, and each block is linked to the previous block. Information of a blockchain network is immutably recorded across a P2P network by each block. Blockchain has many applications, such as healthcare, finance, Internet of Things (IoT), data storage, decentralized cryptocurrency, and many more.

In the healthcare sector, e-healthcare is very important in which Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools are used to maintain the health information of any patient. Currently, healthcare records are saved in databases controlled by an individual user, organization, or large groups of organizations. As there are numerous malicious users, this information must not be shared with other organizations due to security issues and the chances of the data being modified or tampered. Blockchain technology can be used in e-healthcare systems to securely exchange healthcare data, which can be accessed by organizations sharing the same network, allowing doctors/practitioners to provide better care for patients. The key properties of blockchain technology, such as immutability and transparency, improve e-healthcare interoperability.

This edited book discusses many applications of blockchain technology in e-healthcare management, including applications in the pharmaceutical industry, healthcare data security, and many more. Chapter 1 of this edited book discusses the fundamentals of blockchain technology. Chapter 2 represents how blockchain technology can be used to manage healthcare records, while Chapter 3 deliberates upon applications of blockchain technology in the pharmaceutical sector. Chapter 4 focuses on many techniques that are being used to manage health insurance using blockchain technology. Nowadays, blockchain technology is continuously used in various ways to improve e-healthcare data security, which are discussed in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 deals with the integration of blockchain technology with IoT to monitor a patient’s health. After that, Chapter 7 represents a case study of blockchain technology to manage e-healthcare data. Finally, challenges and future work directions in e-healthcare using blockchain technology are represented in Chapter 8.

Written by a range of international experts, the book will be of interest to researchers and academics in information security, data scientists, and healthcare professionals/administrators with responsibility for e-Healthcare records.