Blockchain in Healthcare
I am interested in how blockchain could address some of the structural problems in healthcare — health records, data ownership, interoperability, and trust.
My current research is a scoping review of blockchain-based electronic health records in African healthcare: not just whether blockchain can be used here, but where it genuinely makes sense, and what implementation would actually look like in real health systems.
Healthcare across much of Africa has a records problem, and underneath it a data problem. What interests me is whether blockchain is part of the answer — and, just as importantly, where it is not.
This page is where I work that question out — which parts of the problem distributed ledgers genuinely address, and what the evidence so far supports.
Why blockchain, specifically
Distributed ledgers are built to provide much of what that record layer lacks.
One record, many custodians. Hospitals, labs and pharmacies that have no reason to trust each other can still agree on a single shared history without any one of them owning it.
A history that cannot be quietly rewritten. Every access and every amendment leaves a trace. In a system where records go missing and notes get altered after the fact, tamper-evidence is not a technicality — it is patient safety.
Consent the patient actually holds. The patient grants and revokes access themselves, rather than requesting their own history from an institution that treats it as property.
Portability by default. A record that lives on shared infrastructure moves with the patient — between hospitals, between states, across borders.
This is the part that makes it worth the effort. Africa is not retrofitting a mature national health IT system the way Europe and North America must. In much of the continent, the infrastructure is still being decided. That is a rare position to be in: the chance to build the right architecture the first time rather than spend a generation migrating away from the wrong one.
The research
I am conducting a scoping review of blockchain-based electronic health records in African healthcare — surveying what has actually been proposed, piloted and evaluated on the continent, rather than what is theoretically possible.
This is work in progress. Findings will be published here once the review is complete.
Read further
I write about these ideas as I work through them — what the technology can carry, what it cannot, and what implementation would really demand of an African health system.