ABSTRACT
Recently, there has been a growing demand for nursing staff to provide control to patients in their personal health records. But security concerns regarding the way in which various healthcare providers exchange healthcare information have led to such systems not being connected. The ability to exchange data security is important so that new, unified integrated care services can be delivered to patients. Thanks to its decentralized nature, blockchain technology is an appropriate driving force for the much-needed transition to integrated care, providing new insights and addressing some of the key challenges in many healthcare areas. It is worth mentioning that health data and services are gradually transferred to the cloud for the practicality showed in the real-time accessibility to a full patient medical history and savings showed in managing health data and healthcare economics. Yet, in a growing cloud-based setting, applying traditional cryptographic primitives and access control patterns to solve privacy and security issues is challenging. In the proximal future, the development of quantum computing may cast doubt on the impregnability of blockchain. This chapter explores the opportunities to apply the blockchain technique to safeguard health data hosted on the cloud. It also highlights the pragmatic obstacles and additionally needed investigations.
