Healthcare is a data-intensive domain, once a considerable volume of data is daily to monitoring patients, managing clinical research, producing medical records, and processing medical insurance claims. While the focus of applications of blockchain in practice has been to build distributed ledgers involving virtual tokens, the impetus of this emerging technology has now extended to the medical domain. With the increased popularity, it is crucial to study how this technology accompanied with a system for smart contracts can support and challenge the healthcare domain for all interrelated actors (patients, physicians, insurance companies, regulators) and involved assets (e.g. patients' data, physician's data, equipment's and drug's supply chain, etc.). The contributions of this paper are the following: (i) report the results of a systematic literature review conducted to identify, extract, evaluate and synthesize the studies on the symbiosis of blockchain in healthcare; (ii) summarize and categorize existing benefits/challenges on incorporating blockchain in healthcare domain; (iii) provide a framework that will facilitate new research activities; and (iv) establish the state of evidence with in-depth assessment.
16 April 2014 in Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering
The need for cybersecurity education has grown significantly for all citizens. However, cybersecurity education has not been adequately addressed in fields outside of this domain. Cybersecurity concerns increase every time a new device connects to a network. As such, we need to increase involvement and advancement of cybersecurity education at all levels and in every discipline. Education, audit, and enforcement regarding cybersecurity are critical aspects and are the responsibility of all system stakeholders. It is no longer enough to rely on the security team to be responsible for combating cyber threats. Involvement and commitment from all stakeholders are essential and universal and begins with a cross-disciplinary reform in education. In this paper, the need to deliver cybersecurity education across all disciplines and at all levels is discussed. Specifically, the focus is at the following four types of users: K-12, college, technical professionals, and all other citizens. A curriculum roadmap that integrates cybersecurity throughout technical and nontechnical curricula is proposed as a foundation for future cyber education planning. The goal is to introduce students and citizens to the concept of cybersecurity, to ensure they can apply cybersecurity concepts, and to expose them to multiple approaches to solving cybersecurity related problems.
The Internet of Things (IoT), with its distinguished features such as sensing and intelligence (artificial and regular), can support and significantly benefit the pedagogical processes for all interrelated actors (faculty, students, and staff) as well as all assets involved (libraries, classrooms, and labs).