Blockchain-based Electronic Health Records Management: A Comprehensive Review and Future Research Direction

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are electronically-stored health information in a digital format. EHRs are typically shared among healthcare stakeholders and face power failure, data misuse, lack of privacy, security, and audit trail. On the other hand, blockchain is the revolutionary invention of the twentieth century that offers a distributed and decentralized setting to communicate among nodes in a list of networks without a central authority. It can address the limitations of EHRs management and provide a safer, secured, and decentralized environment for exchanging EHRs data. Three categories of blockchain-based potential solutions have been proposed by researchers to handle EHRs: conceptual, prototype, and implemented. This study focused on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to find and analyze articles submitted either conceptual or implemented to manage EHRs using blockchain. The study examined 99 papers that were collected from various publication categories. The deep technical analysis focused on evaluating articles based on privacy, security, scalability, accessibility, cost, consensus algorithms, and the type of blockchain used. The SLR found that blockchain technology promises to provide decentralization, security, and privacy that traditional EHRs often lack. Moreover, results obtained from the detailed studies would provide potential researchers with the type of blockchain for future research. Finally, future research directions, in the end, would direct enthusiasm to combine new blockchain-based systems to manage EHRs properly.