Foreword

Blockchain technology has successfully revolutionized cryptocurrencies by creating a new form of money transactions without relying on having trust in a centralized/third-party service to function. The blockchain is a special distributed ledger technology with tremendous potential to revolutionize how we change value, transfer ownership, and verify transactions in many industrial sectors. A blockchain system is a shared, immutable, distributed digital ledger system that stores linked blocks of peer-to-peer transactions, agreements, and control records, in which the data stored cannot be tampered with. Relying on established cryptographic algorithms, the blockchain allows each participant in the system to interact without pre-existing trust between each other. Unlike traditional centralized systems, a blockchain system does not have a central authority, and all transactional information is stored in blocks and distributed across all participants in the network. Restrict verification is required before adding any information to the chain, which allows trustless participants to share data without losing control and ownership while maintaining an immutable audit trail of all interactions. The decentralized nature of blockchain allows blockchain to help enterprises build processes and solutions, reducing costs, increasing traceability, verifying ownership and proving identity, improving customer experience, and enhancing security. This book provides a good exploration of e-blockchain technology and details on how it can be used to solve business problems. It also explores what they can achieve in various industrial sectors, specifically in medicine and healthcare. In the healthcare sector, a typical use case of blockchain technology is blockchain-enabled supply chain governance, which integrates blockchain technology into the supply chain management system to create a more traceable, secure, transparent, and reliable supply chain system. Using self-executing smart contracts, the blockchain pharmaceutical supply chain takes into account the requirements and interests of all stakeholders. It offers immutability from lab to bedside and secure data management. Blockchain has a broad field of applications in the medicine and healthcare industry, which can facilitate the immutable and secure exchange of medical records and personal data, manage the pharmaceutical supply chain and maintain the traceability of all information involved. On the other hand, the blockchain is capable of keeping an immutable, traceable, secure, transparent, and decentralized database of all patient data and medical records. The restricted verification using cryptographic algorithms in blockchain technology also allows patients, clinics, healthcare organizations, and healthcare providers to share medical information without privacy leakage concerns. This book brings new insights and opportunities that can make medicine and healthcare sectors secure, efficient, and interoperable by using blockchain technology. The insights and solutions of blockchain highlighted in this work can also be easily ported to other industry sections to address challenges related to transparency, immutability, traceability, and full ecosystem interoperability. This work is expected to prompt the realization of the full potential of blockchain technology in medicine and healthcare and illustrate how to build blockchain application ecosystems.