Abstract
Objectives: Telehealth and telemedicine systems aim to deliver
remote healthcare services to mitigate the spread of COVID‐19. Also,
they can help to manage scarce healthcare resources to control the
massive burden of COVID-19 patients in hospitals. However, a large
portion of today’s telehealth and telemedicine systems are centralized
and fall short of providing necessary information security and privacy,
operational transparency, health records immutability, and traceability
to detect frauds related to patients’ insurance claims and physician
credentials.
Methods: The current study has explored the potential
opportunities and adaptability challenges for blockchain technology in
telehealth and telemedicine sector. It has explored the key role that
blockchain technology can play to provide necessary information security
and privacy, operational transparency, health records immutability, and
traceability to detect frauds related to patients’ insurance claims and
physician credentials.
Results: Blockchain technology can improve telehealth and
telemedicine services by offering remote healthcare services in a manner
that is decentralized, tamper-proof, transparent, traceable, reliable,
trustful, and secure. It enables health professionals to accurately
identify frauds related to physician educational credentials and medical
testing kits commonly used for home-based diagnosis.
Conclusions: Wide deployment of blockchain in telehealth and
telemedicine technology is still in its infancy. Several challenges and
research problems need to be resolved to enable the widespread adoption
of blockchain technology in telehealth and telemedicine systems.