{"title":"Healthcare Futures: Opportunities, Challenges and Risks in a Blockchain-Driven Environment.","authors":"Robert Goldberg, Peter J Pitts, Jennifer Hinkel","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.345","DOIUrl":"10.30953/bhty.v7.345","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11848835/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143494880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tracing the Blockchain Challenges in Healthcare: A Topic Modeling and Bibliometric Analysis.","authors":"Mohammad Mehraeen, Laya Mahmoudi","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.335","DOIUrl":"10.30953/bhty.v7.335","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The application of blockchain technology to healthcare offers promise in providing solutions to some key challenges related to data sharing, privacy, security, and access control. However, several barriers prevent the widespread adoption of blockchain and prompted research efforts. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of 196 documents indexed in the Scopus database to examine their structure, impact, contributors, and journals. The bibliometric analysis provides information on the publication and citation structure, as well as the most productive authors, universities, countries, journals, and most cited studies. In addition, it identifies the most prevalent keywords and their co-occurrence patterns on blockchain challenges in healthcare. A topic modeling approach, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), is also employed to reveal the latent topical structure of this literature. As a result of these findings, the research landscape in this area has been quantitatively analyzed, identifying six critical challenges regarding the use of blockchain in healthcare: data privacy/security, integration with smart devices, interoperability, scalability, governance, and cost.</p>","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11848838/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143494891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes, Jennifer Hinkel, Olga Kubassova
{"title":"Predictions for 2025: Artificial Intelligence in Modern Drug Development, Quantum-Proof Encryption, and Health Data Monetization.","authors":"Ingrid Vasiliu-Feltes, Jennifer Hinkel, Olga Kubassova","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30953/bhty.v7.361","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We are witnessing an unprecedented convergence of scientific discoveries, technology innovations, exponential adoption of technology, and remarkable population demographic shifts towards a digitally native society. The Nobel Prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics awarded this year further validate the profound impact of technology on healthcare and life sciences. For 2025, designated by the United Nations as The Year of Quantum Technology, we envision further technology-driven innovations in all domains, triggering the transition to a novel health ecosystem. The role of artificial technology in modern drug development, the demand for quantum-proof encryption, and the opportunities of blockchain in health data monetization are all trends that can be disruptive for pharma, healthcare, and healthcare finance.</p>","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11848841/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143494881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ethics of Blockchain by Design: Guiding a Responsible Future for Healthcare Innovation.","authors":"Muthu Ramachandran","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.362","DOIUrl":"10.30953/bhty.v7.362","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The rapid evolution of blockchain technology in healthcare presents unparalleled opportunities for advancements, including enhanced patient data security, decentralized systems for trustless operations, and transparent supply chain management. However, as blockchain reshapes the healthcare landscape, it demands a robust ethical framework that guides its design and implementation. \"Ethics of Blockchain by Design\" emphasizes embedding ethical principles at the heart of blockchain innovation, fostering public trust, equity, and long-term societal benefits. In this article, the author proposes a set of best practices guidelines on the ethics of blockchain by design.</p>","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11848840/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143494879","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Systematic Review of Usability Factors, Models, and Frameworks with Blockchain Integration for Secure Mobile Health (mHealth) Applications.","authors":"Irum Feroz, Nadeem Ahmad","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.357","DOIUrl":"10.30953/bhty.v7.357","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This systematic review examines critical usability factors that influence the adoption of mobile health (applications among older adults) and identifies gaps in current usability models, including ISO 9241-11, Nielsen's heuristics, and Panicoideae, Aristidoideae, Chloridoideae, Micrairoideae, Arundinoideae, Danthonioideae. This review also explores the potential role of blockchain technology in enhancing multimodal medical data systems within mHealth applications. A comprehensive search across six databases yielded 1,073 studies, with 60 meeting the inclusion criteria. Studies were analyzed through thematic synthesis to identify key success factors (RQ1) and comparative analysis to assess limitations in existing frameworks (RQ2). Key factors promoting mHealth adoption included ease of use, efficiency, error prevention, learnability, memorability, and user satisfaction. Blockchain integration emerged as a promising approach to improve data security, interoperability, and user trust, particularly for older adults who engage with complex, multimodal health data. Findings from RQ2 highlighted gaps in usability models, such as the lack of age-specific guidance for multimodal interaction, error recovery, and data privacy. These results underscore the need to define a new usability framework and incorporate blockchain to meet the unique needs of older adults in mHealth applications, supporting both secure and accessible healthcare management.</p>","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11848842/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143494889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"My Holistic Data Share: A WEB3 Data Share Application: Extending Beyond Finance to Privacy-Protected Decentralised Share of Multi-Dimensional Data to Enhance Global Healthcare.","authors":"Sathya Krishnasamy","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.341","DOIUrl":"10.30953/bhty.v7.341","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>WEB3 technologies on network architectures, distributed ledgers and decentralised artificial intelligence represent a transformative shift in how data are handled, stored and shared. These innovations promise to significantly enhance consumer data privacy rights by addressing fundamental vulnerabilities associated with traditional centralised systems and self-custody wallets. Data breaches in traditional systems operated mainly by third parties are more common, resulting in significant data leaks because of centralised storage and excessive data movement, sometimes unnecessarily. Healthcare data breaches have been a growing concern globally. Several hospitals faced operational halts on account of the impact of ransomware on patient care and privacy. WEB3 Wallets are a vital component emerging as a significant force for global financial inclusion, especially in developing economies. They promote inclusion, reduce costs and empower individuals through self-custody. Though major improvements are needed in these wallets, their use is rising steadily. The global cryptocurrency user base is expected to reach over 500 million by 2025, with substantial growth in emerging markets, according to a report by Statista in 2023. This paper introduces a concept beyond cryptocurrencies and finance into everyday real-world use cases that need combinatorial access to a person's holistic data, including financial and health records, genomic data, advanced directives, among others, that need to be privacy protected and shared with specific actors identified for their roles in the WEB3 ecosystem through decentralised identifiers and non-fungible token badges identifying particular recipients. The author introduced the concept at ETHBoston in April 2024, won accolades for a primitive implementation using underlying threshold cryptography technologies, and enhanced it into a conceptual holistic data share application for global healthcare as presented in this paper.</p>","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11624492/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142796582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creating a Health Data Marketplace for the Digital Health Era.","authors":"Imtiaz Khan, Mohamed Maher, Anjum Khurshid","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.338","DOIUrl":"10.30953/bhty.v7.338","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11624494/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142796664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The European Digital Identity Wallet: A Healthcare Perspective.","authors":"Danny Van Roijen","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.344","DOIUrl":"10.30953/bhty.v7.344","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11624493/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142796590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Biagio Boi, Franco Cirillo, Marco De Santis, Christian Esposito
{"title":"Soulbound Tokens: Enabler for Privacy-Aware and Decentralized Authentication Mechanism in Medical Data Storage.","authors":"Biagio Boi, Franco Cirillo, Marco De Santis, Christian Esposito","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.334","DOIUrl":"10.30953/bhty.v7.334","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Context: </strong>The digitalization of the healthcare sector faces significant challenges due to the diverse representation of data and their distribution across various hospitals. Moreover, security is a key concern as healthcare-related data are subject to the legal obligations of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar data protection legislation. Standardization efforts like Health Level Seven (HL7) have been implemented to enhance data interoperability. However, authentication still remains a critical issue with significant challenges.</p><p><strong>Aim: </strong>This research aims to improve and strengthen the authentication process by introducing a novel architecture for decentralized authentication. Additionally, it proposes a new approach to decentralized data management, which is crucial for handling sensitive medical data efficiently.</p><p><strong>Methodology: </strong>The proposed architecture adopts a user-centric approach, utilizing Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). It introduced a new non-fungible token (NFT) type called soulbound token (SBT) in the medical context, which will facilitate user authentication across different hospitals, effectively creating a federation of interconnected institutions.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>The implementation of the proposed architecture demonstrated a significant reduction in authentication time across multiple hospitals. The use of SBT ensured secure and seamless user authentication, enhancing overall system interoperability and data security. The decentralized approach also mitigated the risks associated with centralized authentication servers.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>This study successfully presents a novel decentralized authentication architecture for the healthcare domain, leveraging SSI and SBTs. This approach accelerates the authentication process and enhances data security and interoperability among hospitals. Future research should explore the scalability of this architecture and its application in other sectors requiring stringent data security measures.</p>","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11624496/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142796583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Model Complexity Reduction for ZKML Healthcare Applications: Privacy Protection and Inference Optimization for ZKML Applications-A Reference Implementation With Synthetic ICHOM Dataset.","authors":"Sathya Krishnasamy, Ilangovan Govindarajan","doi":"10.30953/bhty.v7.340","DOIUrl":"10.30953/bhty.v7.340","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Web 3.0 represents the next significant evolution of the internet that embodies the underlying decentralized network architectures, distributed ledgers, and advanced AI capabilities. Though the technologies are maturing rapidly, considerable barriers exist to high-scale adoption. The author discusses the barriers and the mitigations through specific technologies maturing to solve those issues in an earlier paper titled Moving Beyond POCs and Pilots, published in 2023 in Blockchain in Healthcare Today. These include privacy-preserving technologies, off-chain and on-chain design optimizations, and the multi-dimensional approach needed in planning and adopting these technologies. As an extension, this paper discusses one such enabler, zero knowledge machine learning (ZKML), which merges two streams of technology in unique ways to address problems in privacy and the cost of inference. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) allow one party to prove the validity of a statement to another party without revealing any additional information about the statement itself. The ZKML combines the cryptographic principle of ZKP with machine learning (ML) techniques. It is still a maturing technology and needs baselines for applications in global healthcare. In this effort, the authors conceptualize the technical and operational feasibility of using ZKML and implement a reference healthcare implementation using the synthetic International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) in the evaluation phase in a global healthcare setting for high-volume data collection, including patient-reported outcomes. Model complexity reduction is researched and reported for the ICHOM diabetes dataset to advance the usage of ML models in global standards of healthcare data collection in network decentralized architectures for increased data protection and efficiencies.</p>","PeriodicalId":72422,"journal":{"name":"Blockchain in healthcare today","volume":"7 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11624495/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142796666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}