Preface

Overview

The blockchain revolution has profoundly altered global economics and industry-specific strategic practices. The novel uses of blockchain technology can be viewed as a developing sector in anything from data management, financial services, cyber security, IoT, and food science, to the healthcare business and brain research. While innovative blockchain technology and its applications are still being built and developed, it is crucial that academics and industry professionals gain a more excellent knowledge of this universal phenomenon. An emerging area of study is blockchain in medicine and healthcare. The blockchain combines cryptography, critical public infrastructure and economic modelling with peer-to-peer networking and decentralised consensus to synchronise dispersed databases. Although cutting-edge blockchain technology and its applications are still being created and developed, thus academics and business experts must have a deeper understanding of this global phenomenon. The use of blockchain in healthcare and medicine is a new area of research. The blockchain coordinates scattered databases using peer-to-peer networking, decentralised consensus, critical public infrastructure, economic modelling, and cryptography.

Regarding accurate diagnosis and treatment through safe and secure data sharing, blockchain is also rebuilding conventional healthcare practices more dependably. By integrating all the real-time clinical data about a patient's health and presenting it in an advanced secure healthcare setting, blockchain technology can help us soon provide personalised, authentic, and safe healthcare. Additionally, security, privacy, trust, and scalability considerations are necessary.

Objective

The book "Blockchain Technology in Medicine and Healthcare - Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications" is intended to report on the most recent advancements and innovations in blockchain in medicine and healthcare. The book will be essential in greatly improving human lives. The blockchain, health informatics, and security fields will significantly help researchers and practitioners. This book would be an excellent compendium of cutting-edge methods for using blockchain in healthcare and medical applications. Knowing the top-performing techniques fast will be incredibly helpful for new researchers and practitioners working in the field.

They could contrast various strategies and continue their research in the most crucial area directly affecting improving human life and health. This book would be beneficial because there is yet to be one on the market that offers a comprehensive compilation of cutting-edge blockchain applications in healthcare. The use of blockchain in biomedical and healthcare research is a relatively new development with few established applications.

This book aims to report on the most recent advancements and breakthroughs in security, health informatics, and blockchain. The book's material is divided into three sections; the following three sections go into greater detail on the coverage and topics of each chapter:

• Blockchain and Clinical Trials for Health Informatics.
• Blockchain for Medical Data Analysis.
• Blockchain for Security and Health Information Exchange.

Organisation

The book, “Blockchain Technology in Medicine and Healthcare: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications” consists of 13 edited chapters, and the full contents of the book are organised into the following three sections:

• Part I: Blockchain and Clinical Trials for Health Informatics.

The application of blockchain to clinical trials in health informatics has been the main emphasis of this section. This section consists of three chapters. The first chapter explains how to use blockchain to gather and store patient data, analyse outcomes in a distributed but secure manner, an exchange that data transparently while maintaining its immutability, and overcome the difficulties associated with conducting clinical trials. The second chapter discusses the difficulties in maintaining the confidentiality, accuracy, and integrity of clinical data while conducting clinical trials. Specifics about the data collection techniques used during the clinical trial's operation and the problems they caused. Additionally, it suggests a secure cloud-based clinical data management system that is blockchain-enabled.

The final chapter thoroughly analyses how revolutionary and disruptive blockchain technology is being applied to the healthcare sector to address the problems mentioned above. In a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, a blockchain ledger that is cryptographically immutable, time-stamped, distributed, and tamper-proof can be created to preserve Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in the healthcare system. With the help of this technology, any transaction in a blockchain network has no intermediaries between the source and destination points. The substance of every transaction in a blockchain network cannot be changed because all transactions are cryptographically lither.

The fourth chapter will provide a broad review of guiding principles, applications of blockchain in the healthcare industry, and potential problems and solutions.

• Part II: Blockchain for Medical Data Analysis.

There are six chapters in the second portion. The first contribution looked at numerous cutting-edge blockchain applications in the healthcare industry. The blockchain has more reviews than ever before, but they are constrained. The exoteric study offered in this chapter reveals that, when compared to other applications, this disruptive technology offers clear advantages in the healthcare industry.

The second chapter investigates the current application methods, obstacles faced, open questions, data standards, and compliance issues fundamental to adopting a blockchain-based solution in the healthcare business through a systematic study of the literature on blockchain and healthcare data. The current research also investigates the worries and perspectives of blockchain professionals working in the healthcare sector. The third chapter emphasises blockchain's decentralisation feature and how it will resolve problems. By developing a broad mechanism that connects various personal records, blockchain can help the electronic health records sector by lowering data sharing and interoperability. It can also simulate data sharing by immediately bridging the gap between owners and customers. As a result, this chapter aims to give comprehensive information on using blockchains to advance health research data analysis.

Businesses and governments are looking for solutions as the coronavirus illness (COVID-19) continues to spread worldwide to lessen its impact. In chapter four, a structured literature review of peer-reviewed articles on blockchain's implementation and adoption in the supply chain management, education, logistics, and finance sectors was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of blockchain technology in its efforts to lessen the impact of the pandemic and clearly define the challenges and prospects of blockchain.

It is advised that blockchain be used and adopted in all industries since it offers a decentralised network where information is available, and individual privacy and security are ensured, not just in the banking industry. Therefore, blockchain can be used by businesses, governments, and health professionals in the fight against the virus by transforming the challenges into opportunities combined with prominent essential enablers, which would speed up its wider adoption. Blockchain has been widely accepted and implemented in a few sectors of the economy, especially in finance and supply chain management.

The work carried out by numerous researchers over the previous 11 years is methodically reviewed in chapter four. A projection of a new use of the same technology is proposed, specifically the application and influence of blockchain technology in numerous industries, such as crypto-currencies, the health sector, e-governance, banking, and finance. The final chapter covers distributed ledger technology in the healthcare industry, which has been cited as crucial for producing patient data for research, medication adherence, managing multiple patient bedside data, pharmaceutical supply chain, and quality of care. This chapter will outline how Blockchain distributed ledger technologies are applied to the biomedical and healthcare industries.

• Part III: Blockchain for Security and Health Information Exchange.

This section consists of three chapters. Blockchain technology is the cure that enables medical service units that are based on various platforms to share electronic health record data. However, given the cost and size of the blockchain, Chapter 2 has emphasised that one of the main issues with this strategy is the difficulty in storing all the electronic health record data on the blockchain. Cloud computing was selected as a potential exit strategy. A unique possibility provided by cloud computing includes storage of scalability and availability. However, because sensitive data is exchanged through a public route, the cloud computing-advantaged electronic health records may be vulnerable to attacks. To effectively manage and combine medical care, it is necessary to share and disseminate medical information and data electronically. Unfortunately, it is challenging to share data securely using the outdated cloud-based electronic medical record storage infrastructure. Due to blockchain technology's tamper resistance and traceability, sharing extremely private health information is possible. As a result, this chapter aims to give comprehensive information on the use of blockchain in medical imaging systems.

The construction of the blockchain, its framework, the advantages and disadvantages of combining these technologies, and the function and significance of machine and deep learning algorithms in fraud detection and prevention in the blockchain are covered in the first section of the second chapter. The reported work is the main topic of the next part, which also highlights the work of other researchers who use Blockchain technology to detect and prevent fraud. The chapter's last section compares numerous performance metrics for each sort of fraud detection utilising blockchain technology, including accuracy, the area under the curve, confidence, true negative, false positive, and genuinely positive results.

The final contribution showcases a cutting-edge healthcare framework that uses the blockchain idea. This article mainly aims to use Blockchain to construct electronic health records (EHR). Its decentralised design eliminates the possibility of a single point of failure and strengthens the system. The proposed method uses an off-chain data source to address the extensibility issue that blockchains all share. The findings show that computers are far safer and fraud-free compared to the conventional health record system. Finally, the suggested technique highlights situations where the new approach should work well, like in an EHR.

Target Audiences

The current volume serves as a reference book for a variety of audiences, including the following:

• Researchers working in this area who want to be aware of the most recent advancements in theory, methodology, and research.
• Biomedical and informatics students and academics interested in deepening their understanding of recent advancements.
• Business and professionals from technical institutes, research and development firms, and fields relating to machine learning, blockchain, the internet of things, cloud computing, biomedical engineering, and health informatics.