Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Scientific and Technological Driving Force

Blockchain is a technology to enable decentralized collaboration among un-trusted entities. Academia and industry are rushing to uncover its potential for their field of interest. Due to the novelty of the technology and its diverse applications, there are some ambiguities in approaches and trends. In this paper, we analyze the scientific publications and patents from the past five years to identify the trends for blockchain integration with healthcare. For this purpose, we have adopted a quantitative (clustering) and qualitative (theme extraction) approach to discover themes and temporal dynamics in academia and industry. Our results shed light on the potential challenges and vision for future works.