ABSTRACT
The healthcare sector is increasingly focusing on sustainability for improved patient outcomes, resource efficiency, and data security. Blockchain technology offers promise for addressing these needs by providing decentralized, immutable, and secure data sharing. This chapter reviews the necessity for blockchain interoperability to drive sustainable healthcare transformation. It identifies healthcare industry challenges such as data fragmentation and security vulnerabilities and explores blockchain's features, such as decentralized ledger architecture, and cryptographic mechanisms to address them. Blockchain promotes patient-centric care by enabling secure data sharing while preserving privacy. It streamlines administrative processes and enhances transparency, thus promoting sustainability and public health. Interoperable blockchain networks facilitate communication among healthcare systems, improve patient outcomes and reduce errors. The study investigates the existing works for achieving interoperability by categorizing them into chain, bridge and dApp-based solutions, with further divisions into hash locking, sidechain, notary scheme, relay, blockchain of blockchains, blockchain engine, blockchain agnostic protocol, and blockchain adaptor. This chapter also presents the strengths and limitations of existing approaches as well as the importance of standards and governance models for achieving sustainability. Further, we included future work to foster innovation, efficiency, and patient-centricity in healthcare through blockchain-enabled interoperable ecosystems by addressing regulatory, technical, and organizational issues.
