Table 1.

Blockchain implications for the health care sector.

Group	Benefits	Challenges
Patients	Patients are empowered with self-sovereignty through self-managing personal patient-generated health data The identity of the patients is anonymized	Some patients may not be interested in self-managing their health data
Health care providers	Providing a decentralized database with identical copies of the same complete health information, which is made accessible to all parties in the health care chain Facilitating collaboration and data sharing Claimed immutability of a transaction’s history	Interoperability is a challenge, and complex systems are not the best use cases for blockchain DDoSa attacks are likely to happen and affect the availability of the patient health data A 51% attack, specific to blockchain, affects the integrity of transactions’ data and consumes the network resources Compliance issues with GDPRb Blockchain can be resource consuming when all entities in the chain have to approve a large-sized data block

^aDDoS: distributed denial-of-service.

^bGDPR: General Data Protection Regulation.