Blockchains and Self-Sovereign Identities Applied to Healthcare Solutions: A Systematic Review
It addresses healthcare data management challenges by reviewing existing technologies, but is incremental as it synthesizes prior research without new empirical results.
This systematic review investigates the application of Blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) technologies to electronic health records (EHRs), finding growing interest in Blockchain for solutions like patient monitoring and data trading, but limited adoption of SSI approaches with gaps in defining data ownership and identity concepts.
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), a Blockchain-based technology for digital identity management, is a promising concept for handling health data. It could represent a step forward in empowering users, granting them control over their data. This work conducts a systematic literature review to investigate state-of-the-art measures based on SSI and Blockchain technologies for dealing with electronic health records (EHRs), identifying gaps, and determining the key questions for future research. As a result, this review shows a growing interest in Blockchain methods to handle EHRs, but few works consider using the self-sovereign identity approaches. The results obtained in this work also suggest that: Blockchain technologies provide a viable alternative to deliver EHR solutions such as patient monitoring, healthcare data trading, and prescription control; consolidated Blockchain technologies are the preferred core components of most effective strategies; keeping raw health data off-chain helps to create scalable solutions; health data standards make searching medical records in Blockchain structures feasible; Smart Contracts are essential components of Blockchain-based EHR solutions; the concepts of data ownership and Self-Sovereign Identity have been neither adequately defined nor employed in the health context.