1. Biomedical blockchain with practical implementations and quantitative evaluations: a systematic review
- Author
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Lacson, Roger, Yu, Yufei, Kuo, Tsung-Ting, and Ohno-Machado, Lucila
- Subjects
Health Services and Systems ,Health Sciences ,Information and Computing Sciences ,Data Management and Data Science ,Distributed Computing and Systems Software ,Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) ,Generic health relevance ,Good Health and Well Being ,Blockchain ,Humans ,Information Dissemination ,COVID-19 ,blockchain ,biomedical ,electronic health records ,implementation ,evaluation ,Engineering ,Medical and Health Sciences ,Medical Informatics ,Biomedical and clinical sciences ,Health sciences ,Information and computing sciences - Abstract
ObjectiveBlockchain has emerged as a potential data-sharing structure in healthcare because of its decentralization, immutability, and traceability. However, its use in the biomedical domain is yet to be investigated comprehensively, especially from the aspects of implementation and evaluation, by existing blockchain literature reviews. To address this, our review assesses blockchain applications implemented in practice and evaluated with quantitative metrics.Materials and methodsThis systematic review adapts the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework to review biomedical blockchain papers published by August 2023 from 3 databases. Blockchain application, implementation, and evaluation metrics were collected and summarized.ResultsFollowing screening, 11 articles were included in this review. Articles spanned a range of biomedical applications including COVID-19 medical data sharing, decentralized internet of things (IoT) data storage, clinical trial management, biomedical certificate storage, electronic health record (EHR) data sharing, and distributed predictive model generation. Only one article demonstrated blockchain deployment at a medical facility.DiscussionEthereum was the most common blockchain platform. All but one implementation was developed with private network permissions. Also, 8 articles contained storage speed metrics and 6 contained query speed metrics. However, inconsistencies in presented metrics and the small number of articles included limit technological comparisons with each other.ConclusionWhile blockchain demonstrates feasibility for adoption in healthcare, it is not as popular as currently existing technologies for biomedical data management. Addressing implementation and evaluation factors will better showcase blockchain's practical benefits, enabling blockchain to have a significant impact on the health sector.
- Published
- 2024