Chapter 18: Blockchain Applications in Healthcare

A person's health-related information evolves over time and is usually stored and processed by multiple entities in various formats, substantial volumes, and for different purposes. A patient might visit multiple medical sites during treatment or follow-up resulting in such information being scattered among numerous clinics, hospitals, medical devices, and laboratories. Thus, various entities are processing a person's healthcare data in anonymized and non-anonymized form. Because of such complexity and the number of participants, tracking every data transaction is virtually impossible. Because a patient often does not even know where these data are processed and for what purposes, the patient's privacy rights become threatened.