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Review
. 2023 Apr 29:1-26.
doi: 10.1007/s10586-023-04009-7. Online ahead of print.

Blockchain and COVID-19 pandemic: applications and challenges

Raja Wasim Ahmad  1   2 , Khaled Salah  2 , Raja Jayaraman  3 , Ibrar Yaqoob  2 , Samer Ellahham  4 , Mohammed Omar  3
Affiliations
Review

Blockchain and COVID-19 pandemic: applications and challenges

Raja Wasim Ahmad et al. Cluster Comput. .

Abstract

The year 2020 has witnessed the emergence of coronavirus (COVID-19) that has rapidly spread and adversely affected the global economy, health, and human lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations of existing healthcare systems regarding their inadequacy to timely and efficiently handle public health emergencies. A large portion of today's healthcare systems are centralized and fall short in providing necessary information security and privacy, data immutability, transparency, and traceability features to detect fraud related to COVID-19 vaccination certification, and anti-body testing. Blockchain technology can assist in combating the COVID-19 pandemic by ensuring safe and reliable medical supplies, accurate identification of virus hot spots, and establishing data provenance to verify the genuineness of personal protective equipment. This paper discusses the potential blockchain applications for the COVID-19 pandemic. It presents the high-level design of three blockchain-based systems to enable governments and medical professionals to efficiently handle health emergencies caused by COVID-19. It discusses the important ongoing blockchain-based research projects, use cases, and case studies to demonstrate the adoption of blockchain technology for COVID-19. Finally, it identifies and discusses future research challenges, along with their key causes and guidelines.

Keywords: Blockchain; COVID-19; Healthcare; Security; Traceability.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interestThe authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Leveraging blockchain applications for the COVID-19 pandemic
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Design parameters for digital contact tracing solutions
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Blockchain-based system for digital contact tracing to curb spreading of COVID-19
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
High level design of a blockchain-based system for COVID-19 digital medical passports and immunity certificates
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Blockchain-based system for COVID-19 related data tracking through oracles and smart contracts
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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