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A Study on Blockchain Applications in Healthcare

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Frontier Computing (FC 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 542))

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Abstract

Blockchain or the distributed ledger technology has the power to transform various industries including healthcare. It reduce or abolish the friction and costs of current intermediaries present in network. Decentralized and programmable nature of blockchain applications can be used for the betterment of public and private healthcare system. It has the ability to transform health care, placing the patient at the center of the healthcare ecosystem and increasing the security, privacy, and interoperability of information related to health. It creates various opportunities to reduce complexity, enable trustless collaboration, and create secure and immutable information. Management of electronic health record, conserving patient identification, insurance claiming process, frauds in public programs like medicaid and medicare and prevention of counterfeit drugs are the areas where the use of this new technology is particularly beneficial. Many organizations and research groups are working on resolving issues like interoperability, privacy and security of data, frauds in medicaid program, counterfeit drugs, that plague health IT and have come up with various blockchain solutions to it. We present some of the blockchain solutions, ongoing projects and case studies in this paper.

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Correspondence to Abhishek Sharma .

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Sharma, A., Hung, YH., Agarwal, P., Kalra, M. (2019). A Study on Blockchain Applications in Healthcare. In: Hung, J., Yen, N., Hui, L. (eds) Frontier Computing. FC 2018. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 542. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3648-5_75

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