I-HealthChain 2020 - 1st IEEE Workshop on Advancement of Blockchain Technology in Intelligent Healthcare Industries

Blockchain could be an efficient way to source medical equipment or validate Covid-19 immunity, Wall Street journal (WSJ) Aril 23, 2020. According to CIO, Blockchain will leapfrog population health by providing trust where none exists for continuous access to patient records by directly linking information to clinical and financial outcomes. WSJ also mentioned the advantages of Blockchain technology. Blockchains are distributed and fault-tolerant databases that everyone in the network can share, but no single entity can control. Data integrity is provided as the tampering of blockchains is very difficult due to use of cryptography and lack of reliance on secrets. Further, blockchain is resilient to single-point-of-failure. The data being put onto the blockchain still could be illegitimate data. Stringent procedures are needed to verify that there are no counterfeit products, such as test kits, on the blockchain.
This workshop would facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration among practitioners and researchers working in the field of Blockchain design in intelligent healthcare (e.g., the underpinning cryptographic protocols), distributed systems, cryptography (including cryptanalysis), computer security, and risk management, etc. This workshop will provide a discussion forum for multiple important use cases as on efficacy and limitation of blockchain based application, open research issues and the areas for the future research. It will also help the researchers on identifying the research gaps and the challenges in the field to streamline their future research. The challenges of data security and privacy, interoperability, scalability and the speed that characterize blockchain-based healthcare applications are all open research issues. These issues require concerted further research engagements in order to improve the confidence of the stakeholders in the use of the technology and to foster its adoption in healthcare. Healthcare use cases include the management of electronic medical records, drugs and pharmaceutical supply chain management, biomedical research and education, remote patient monitoring, health data analytics, among others. A number of blockchain-based healthcare applications have been developed as prototypes based on emerging blockchain paradigms, such as smart contracts, permissioned blockchain, off-chain storage, etc. However, further research needs to be conducted to better understand, characterize and evaluate the utility of blockchain technology in healthcare. To supplement the ongoing efforts for addressing the challenges of scalability, latency, interoperability, security and privacy in relation to the use of blockchain technology in healthcare, further research is also needed.