This article aims to provide a primer on blockchain technology and implementation considerations for blockchain at healthcare institutions.

In the health sector, blockchain is being aggressively explored by various stakeholders to optimize business processes, lower costs, improve patient outcomes, enhance compliance, and enable better use of healthcare-related data. However, critical in assessing whether blockchain can fulfill the hype of a technology characterized as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘disruptive’, is the need to ensure that blockchain design elements consider actual healthcare needs from the diverse perspectives of consumers, patients, providers, and regulators. In addition, answering the real needs of healthcare stakeholders, blockchain approaches must also be responsive to  the unique challenges faced in healthcare compared to other sectors of the economy. In this sense, ensuring that a health blockchain is ‘fit-for-purpose’ is pivotal. This concept forms the basis for this article, where we share  views from a multidisciplinary group of practitioners at the forefront of blockchain conceptualization, development, and deployment.

In this review article, we aim to depict how healthcare facilities may look in the near future from an architectural design point of view. For this purpose, we review newly introduced technology and medical advances in the field of healthcare, such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotic surgery, 3D printing, and information technology (IT), and suggest how those advances may affect the architectural design of future healthcare facilities.