The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) is inviting submissions for a special issue of the journal that will be dedicated to blockchain for health care and biomedical science.
Health care is known to suffer from siloed and fragmented data, delayed clinical communications, and disparate workflow tools due to the lack of interoperability caused by vendor-locked health care systems, lack of trust relationships among data holders, and security/privacy concerns regarding data sharing.
Blockchain technology and decentralised applications (DApps) have the potential to alleviate the traditionally high dependency on centralised, trusted parties for certification of information integrity and data ownership. These distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) mediate transactions and exchanges of digital assets in a decentralised and consensus-driven nature, which allows agreements (ie, smart contracts) to be directly made between interacting parties while guaranteeing their execution. Key properties of blockchain technology, including immutability, decentralisation, distribution, replicated storage, and transparency, provide a unique position for this technology to serve as a potential infrastructure to address pressing issues in health care, such as incomplete records at point of care and difficult access to patients’ own health information.
Aside from health care data sharing that is of paramount importance for improving care quality, there is also a wide range of opportunities for health care to leverage a decentralised technology, such as tracking the provenance of medical devices, expediting the process of medical billing and medical claims adjudication, connecting alike patient populations to clinical trials, and creating more patient-centered services. Besides the identifications of various opportunities in the use of blockchain technology in health care, research efforts on rigorously analysing the performance of blockchain-based health care systems, proposed or existing, that focuses on security, privacy, scalability, availability, and robustness are highly demanded.
In addition, blockchain technology also opens up new opportunities for biomedical science and to disrupt the current publishing and peer-review system.
Following the examples of previously published papers on blockchain in health care in JMIR journals, authors are invited to submit papers describing original, unpublished research results, position papers, proposals, tutorials, case studies and tools. Papers are solicited that deal with health care or biomedical research topics related to DLT like blockchain.
Deadline for submission is February 1, 2019.
To submit, interested parties may visit http://www.jmir.org/author and in step 1 of submission, select 'Theme Issue 2019: Blockchain' section from the section drop-down list.
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