Introduction

This book highlights how blockchain and other emerging technologies can improve services, processes, and applications for a sustainable healthcare system. It covers theoretical and practical elements of blockchain technology and analyzes the possibilities, problems, applications, and research in the field of blockchain-based sustainable healthcare applications. It provides the necessary information for readers, blockchain practitioners, researchers, database professionals, etc. Furthermore, the book identifies current literature gaps on the application of blockchain technology in the sustainable healthcare industry.

Challenges in Sustainable Healthcare Data Management

Sustainable healthcare is a data-intensive industry that generates, receives, and transmits massive amounts of data daily. Existing data-sharing protocols in sustainable healthcare systems routinely expose system vulnerabilities in ensuring the confidentiality and security of healthcare data. Most functions in sustainable healthcare systems involve the sharing or use of sensitive and personal data. A serious problem is developing technologies that preserve the usefulness of health data while protecting patient privacy and discretion in how their data is used. As a result, the research community studies safe, privacy-preserving, and sustainable health systems using emerging technologies such as blockchain.

Blockchain's Role in Healthcare

Blockchain has emerged as an essential technology in the current digital transformation of many industries, including supply chain, education, government, healthcare, and many more sustainable applications. Blockchain applications for healthcare data management can potentially develop new services for physicians, patients, and health institutions in patient records administration, payment management, claims, and data integrity. This allows patients and healthcare organizations to limit unauthorized access to sensitive information and to maintain irreversible audit trails of patient data access and change. Blockchain and other emerging technologies can potentially be used for sustainable health supply chain activities. By making the supply chain transparent and immutable, it can monitor and protect healthcare data at various levels while maintaining 100% integrity of healthcare data.