Measuring the impact of blockchain on healthcare applications

Blockchain is a technology with potential for making ground breaking steps in addressing social, economic and healthcare challenges. The global information technology scene is being overcrowded with blockchain applications with special focus on the vast healthcare market [12]. The value of information related to healthcare creates a clear path for applying blockchain as a solution for some of the challenges in the healthcare sector, in particular with the goal of creating a fair and transparent way for sharing information and patient data. It is however a fact that while blockchain technology introduces additional complexity to the implementation healthcare software, the benefit the technology actually brings still remains unclear and difficult to evaluate. This vision paper demonstrates our research focus on providing a body of knowledge and tools to help evaluate this impact of blockchain on eHealth applications. In particular, we identify that such a research effort has to explicitly consider cost of addressing challenges inherent to the eHealth domain like integration of disparate software systems (hospitals, research institutions, government agencies, health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, etc.), the potential introduction of cryptocurrencies in healthcare systems, degree of patient service improvement, transparency and compliance to laws and regulations, and others. The more traditional influencing factors, like cost of development and running, licenses for using third-party software services, and the ones inherent to blockchain like cost of computation and energy will also have to be taken into consideration in the metrics model.