Blockchain for the Next Decade: Future Trends and Predictions in Healthcare

Abstract

The digital era healthcare everywhere is leveraging towards implementing blockchain technology as a fundamental element to enable secure, transparent, and decentralised solutions for the worldwide. In this chapter we will explore where blockchain in healthcare is likely to go over the next decade, with a particular emphasis on how it may be used to address the challenges of patient data management, interoperability and supply chain security. In the world of decentralized health care ecosystems fuelled by blockchain to help data integrity, privacy and access this chapter looks at where blockchain intersects with artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning, and how these intersections are expected to evolve personalized medicine, real-time patient monitoring and predictive analytics. We also discuss the regulations issues, ethical and privacy concerns as well as prerequisite blockchain infrastructure enhancements needed to facilitate DCT utilization and provide recommendations for healthcare stakeholders based on our review.