Assessment of the Blockchain Technology Adoption for the Management of the Electronic Health Record Systems

Blockchain has applications in a broad range of settings, including healthcare (e.g., patient data management, health supply chain management, financial and insurance claims, and preventing counterfeit medications). There are, however, challenges associated with implementing such solutions, for example project failure rate, and the need for various parties to function together. Currently, there is a lack of quantitative and comprehensive models in the literature that researchers and practitioners can use to assess healthcare organizations’ readiness for blockchain adoption, particularly from multiple perspectives and using expert judgements. Thus, the objective of this article is to develop a scoring model to evaluate healthcare organization's readiness to adopt blockchain in the context of electronic health records system management. Specifically, in this article, a literature review and expert feedback were used to identify the most important factors influencing blockchain adoption. The outcomes of the article present an identification and prioritization of the blockchain adoption impacting factors. The article identified 17 factors. These factors are grouped into five perspective: financial, social, technical, organizational, and regulations and legal. The results of the article highlight that regulation compliance, regulation uncertainty, budget availability, management support, security and privacy, and financial risk and uncertainty play an important role in the organization's readiness for blockchain adoption. The readiness scoring model then developed and evaluated through two real-world case studies at two healthcare organizations. Two case studies were conducted to demonstrate the practicality of the research model, identify areas of deficiencies, and propose corrective actions in the healthcare organization's capabilities. The goal is to prevent any possible issues, before the project starts, in order to increase chances of a successful blockchain adoption.