Blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology, has gained widespread adoption in many fields apart from financial transactions. With high security and transparency, it is used in supply chain management systems, healthcare, payments, business, Internet of Things (IoT), voting systems, and many more for securing a wide range of digital assets from tampering. Blockchain technology is also used to share, replicate, and synchronize data, and to track transactions and assets in any type of business across different geographical locations. Rather than working with a central authority to control all the data transactions, blockchain technology uses a consensus mechanism, where all the nodes of the system need to agree on a new transaction. At first, this chapter discusses all the fundamental aspects and technical details along with the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain. It also discusses different types of blockchain networks with their pros and cons, smart contracts, and hyperledger technology. Then, several applications of blockchain technology and challenges in adopting it in various industries are also given in this chapter to show how the technology works as a whole.

The pharmaceutical companies that manufacture, ship, and supply medical products face various challenges in tracing the products and identifying the counterfeit drugs in the supply chain system. Counterfeit drugs are one of the major consequences within the existing supply chain, which seriously affects human health and causes severe loss to the economy of the healthcare industry. Moreover, the traditional supply chain systems suffer from various challenges such as lack of transparency, limited tracing and tracking of products, privacy-related issues, and inaccurate information. The solution to the identified challenges is to leverage blockchain technology in the pharmaceutical system that adds traceability, visibility, privacy, and security to the drug supply chain. Blockchain technology is an advanced technology that stores medical product-related details in a completely decentralized manner and ensure transparency in the supply chain process. Thus, this chapter presents the drug discovery process, the pharmaceutical supply chain management system and its challenges, the need for clinical trials, and various preventive measures involved in the current pharmaceutical supply chain consortium. Then, we discuss the use case of a blockchain-based supply chain system for the pharmaceutical sector to track medical products and highlight its functionalities using the smart contract concept. The use case also explains the various smart contract concepts utilize to guarantee data provenance, eliminate the intermediatory authority, provide an immutability feature with security, maintain product traceability, and ensure transparency.

The current medical services suffer from critical difficulties like detailed information, detectability, unchanging nature, review, information provenance, universal access, trust, protection, and security. Additionally, an enormous piece of the existing medical services framework utilized for overseeing data is brought together, which might suffer from a single point of failure in cataclysmic events. This limitation must be overcome using advanced decentralized, secure technologies like blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized technology that can alter, reshape, and change how information is being taken care of in the medical sector. This chapter talks about utilizing blockchain to share medical data securely. This chapter presents the critical blockchain elements and attributes from a security perspective. It also examines the benefits of blockchain innovation alongside potential open doors for the medical sector to preserve privacy and security. At last, this chapter presents ongoing tasks and contextual investigations to show the reasonableness of blockchain innovation for different healthcare applications and areas. Furthermore, this proposed work distinguishes and talks about significant open examination challenges upsetting the fruitful reception of blockchain in the healthcare area.

Changing socio-economic factors, scientific breakthroughs in biomedical research, as well as the emergence of new materials and information technologies are profoundly transforming the healthcare sector. In the last 20 years, a large number of research and development projects and standardization activities have concerned the processing, sharing and presentation of data through reliable, scalable, and economically sustainable systems. In particular, blockchain-based technologies are playing an increasing role in collecting, handling, storing, and updating medical records securely. After the illustration of the current challenges faced by the healthcare organizations in data management, this chapter focuses on a specific use case related to the update of the Patient Summary. This health data document is of fundamental importance for a correct knowledge of the patient's clinical history. The authors developed a blockchain system to support the general practitioner in the Patient Summary update process, ensuring the integrity of the health data and validating the entire medical process through smart contract programming. The proof-of-concept simulation demonstrates the practicability of the technical approach and its ability in improving the current management of the Patient Summary update process.