Blockchain Technology: A Game Changer for Smart Healthcare Systems

Blockchain technology enables reliable, secure, traceable, distributed, and fault-tolerant data storage. With the emergence of smart contracts (programs that run above the blockchain), the technology is no longer used only for financial purposes but also for more complex applications. This chapter aims to present the fundamental characteristics of blockchain and how it works. We show the main use cases of blockchain and examples of their use focused on the health area. Also, we discuss the application scenarios and the challenges to be overcome for the implementation and deployment of the technology.