Tracing the Blockchain Challenges in Healthcare: A Topic Modeling and Bibliometric Analysis

The application of blockchain technology to healthcare offers promise in providing solutions to some key challenges related to data sharing, privacy, security, and access control. However, several barriers prevent the widespread adoption of blockchain and prompted research efforts. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of 196 documents indexed in the Scopus database to examine their structure, impact, contributors, and journals. The bibliometric analysis provides information on the publication and citation structure, as well as the most productive authors, universities, countries, journals, and most cited studies. In addition, it identifies the most prevalent keywords and their co-occurrence patterns on blockchain challenges in healthcare. A topic modeling approach, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), is also employed to reveal the latent topical structure of this literature. As a result of these findings, the research landscape in this area has been quantitatively analyzed, identifying six critical challenges regarding the use of blockchain in healthcare: data privacy/security, integration with smart devices, interoperability, scalability, governance, and cost. Plain Language Summary Despite the potential of blockchain technology to improve healthcare, its widespread adoption remains limited. This study examines the research conducted on blockchain challenges in healthcare. A bibliometric analysis of 196 studies was performed to clarify the current state of this research area. In addition, a topic modeling technique was used to identify the major challenges: data privacy/security, integration with smart devices, interoperability, scalability, governance, and cost. This analysis demonstrates that data privacy/security and integration with smart devices are the predominant challenges regarding their topic size. These findings provide a comprehensive overview of the obstacles blockchain faces in healthcare and highlight areas for future research. © 2024, Partners in Digital Health. All rights reserved.