IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July/August 2023 - 22

NFTs in Healthcare
FIGURE 1. Typical NFT ecosystem workflow
diagram.
2017 when the public became aware of NFTs
because of the success of the online game called
CryptoKitties.4 The NFT market experienced
explosive growth during 2020, when its value tripled
to around 250 million USD, and an additional
200 million USD was spent on NFTs during
the first quarter of 2021.5 The concept of protecting
the ownership of digital content is not new. It
is becoming closer to reality through the adoption
of NFTs.
The adoption of NFTs has been mostly witnessed
in the gaming and art industries.4 However,
other industries, such as healthcare, can
greatly benefit from NFTs to mitigate some of
their existing issues. For example, most healthcare
institutions hold patients' records in an
archive that is inaccessible to other healthcare
institutions, and in some cases, they share these
records with a third party without the patient's
consent.6 The use of NFTs fits perfectly into
these applications because they allow patients
to own their health records and track all the
activities associated with them.
Figure 1 illustrates a typical workflow of an
NFT ecosystem. The ecosystem consists of a
blockchain that permanently stores all transactions,
an NFT marketplace platform that facilitates
the minting and exchanging processes, and
decentralized storage where the actual content
is stored. The following are the details of each
step in the NFT ecosystem. First, the content creator
uploads his/her work to decentralized storage,
which in exchange produces a unique hash
for the uploaded content.7 Second, the content
creator interacts with the NFT marketplace
decentralized application to create an NFT for
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the created work. The content creator provides
the NFT marketplace with the uploaded content
hash and all the required information. Third, the
NFT marketplace mints the NFT based on the
content creator's inputs and assigns his address
to it to preserve ownership rights. At the end of
this step, the minted NFT becomes available for
others to place their offers if they are interested.
Fourth, an interested buyer places an offer on
the listed NFT, and if the content creator accepts
the offer, the ownership of the NFT is transferred
to the buyer.
To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing
studies has explored the opportunities and
challenges of NFTs in healthcare, as can be seen in
Table 1. Unlike the existing studies conducted in
Rehman et al., 8 Rehman et al., 31 Wang et al.32 our
study focuses on the applications of NFTs in
healthcare. In this article, we give an overview of
NFTs along with their key features and components.
We discuss howthe integration of NFTs and
healthcare can assist in creating a new ecosystem
that is decentralized and self-sovereign. We outline
the key benefits brought about by this integration.
We present the potential opportunities for
NFTs in healthcare. In addition, we show how the
system architecture for such applications can be
structured and organized. Finally, we identify and
discuss open challenges along with their key
causes that hinder the adoption of NFTs in healthcare
applications.
The rest of this article is organized as follows.
The " NFTs Definition, Key Components, and
Features " section provides a background for different
concepts, such as blockchain and NFTs.
The " Opportunities for NFTs in Healthcare " section
presents NFT opportunities in healthcare.
The " NFT Challenges in Healthcare " and
" Addressing NFT Challenges in Healthcare " sections
discuss the key challenges for NFTs in
healthcare and their possible solutions. The
" Conclusion and Future Directions " section concludes
this article and summarizes the main
findings.
NFTS DEFINITION, KEY
COMPONENTS, AND FEATURES
This section provides an overview of blockchain
technology, smart contracts, and NFTs,
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IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July/August 2023

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