Blockchain as a digital ledger for keeping records of digital transactions and other information, it is secure and decentralized technology. The globally growing number of digital population every day possesses a significant threat to online data including the medical and patients data. After bitcoin, blockchain technology has emerged into a general-purpose technology with applications in medical industries and healthcare. Blockchain can promote highly configurable openness while retaining the highest security standards for critical data of medical patients. Referred to as distributed record keeping for healthcare systems which makes digital assets unalterable and transparent via a cryptographic hash and decentralized network. The study delves into the security and safety improvement associated with implementing blockchain in AI-based healthcare systems. Blockchain-enabled AI tackles the existing issues related to security, performance efficiencies, and safety in healthcare systems. We have also examined the Artificial Intelligence in healthcare and medical industry, potential areas, open questions concerning the blockchain in healthcare systems. Finally, the article proposed an AI
Large-scale disasters, such as pandemics and climate-related events, place extraordinary pressure on healthcare providers due to extreme demand surges. Managing these surges is essential to sustaining healthcare resilience. Although numerous studies on healthcare resilience, far less attention has been given to physicians and to how patterns of patient movement can help redistribute demand and alleviate stress on overburdened providers. In this study, we analyzed billions of electronic medical records documenting patient visits to primary care physicians (PCPs) to construct inter-regional patient flow networks across the U.S. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we observed that cross-regional flow rose to 2.81%, compared to the pre-pandemic level of 2.08%. This redistribution absorbed, on average, 58% of the excess stress on PCPs, meaning more than half of the surging demand was handled by patients' moves to less burdened regions, an absolute 43 percentage point improvement from the pre-pandemic baseline of 15%. Further analysis suggests that strengthening cross-regional patient flow could allow the healthcare system to absorb even more stress and reduce the demand for PCPs. These findin
Modern healthcare facilities demand digital accessibility to guarantee equal access to telemedicine platforms, online pharmacy services, and health monitoring devices that can be worn or are handy. With the rising call for the implementation of robust digital healthcare solutions, people with disabilities encounter impediments in their endeavor of managing and getting accustomed to these modern technologies owing to insufficient accessibility features. The paper highlights the role of comprehensive solutions for enhanced patient engagement and usability, particularly, in digital pharmacy, healthcare, and wearable devices. Besides, it elucidates the key obstructions faced by users experiencing auditory, visual, cognitive, and motor impairments. Through a kind consideration of present accessibility guidelines, practices, and emerging technologies, the paper provides a holistic overview by offering innovative solutions, accentuating the vitality of compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and other regulatory structures to foster easy access to digital healthcare services. Moreover, there is due focus on using AI-driven tools,
This study presents a comparative analysis of three Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) solutions in a question and answer (Q&A) setting: Drug-GPT 3, Drug-GPT 4, and ChatGPT, in the context of healthcare applications. The objective is to determine which model delivers the most accurate and relevant information in response to prompts related to patient experiences with atopic dermatitis (AD) and healthcare professional (HCP) discussions about diabetes. The results demonstrate that while all three models are capable of generating relevant and accurate responses, Drug-GPT 3 and Drug-GPT 4, which are supported by curated datasets of patient and HCP social media and message board posts, provide more targeted and in-depth insights. ChatGPT, a more general-purpose model, generates broader and more general responses, which may be valuable for readers seeking a high-level understanding of the topics but may lack the depth and personal insights found in the answers generated by the specialized Drug-GPT models. This comparative analysis highlights the importance of considering the language model's perspective, depth of knowledge, and currency when evaluating the usefulness of generat
Chronic diseases constitute the principal burden of morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs worldwide, yet current health systems remain fragmented and predominantly reactive. Patient Medical Digital Twins (PMDTs) offer a paradigm shift: holistic, continuously updated digital counterparts of patients that integrate clinical, genomic, lifestyle, and quality-of-life data. We report early implementations of PMDTs via ontology-driven modeling and federated analytics pilots. Insights from the QUALITOP oncology study and a distributed AI platform confirm both feasibility and challenges: aligning with HL7 FHIR and OMOP standards, embedding privacy governance, scaling federated queries, and designing intuitive clinician interfaces. We also highlight technical gains, such as automated reasoning over multimodal blueprints and predictive analytics for patient outcomes. By reflecting on these experiences, we outline actionable insights for software engineers and identify opportunities, such as DSLs and model-driven engineering, to advance PMDTs toward trustworthy, adaptive chronic care ecosystems.
Spending by the UK's National Health Service (NHS) on independent healthcare treatment has been increased in recent years and is predicted to sustain its upward trend with the forecast of population growth. Some have viewed this increase as an attempt not to expand the patients' choices but to privatize public healthcare. This debate poses a social dilemma whether the NHS should stop cooperating with Private providers. This paper contributes to healthcare economic modelling by investigating the evolution of cooperation among three proposed populations: Public Healthcare Providers, Private Healthcare Providers and Patients. The Patient population is included as a main player in the decision-making process by expanding patient's choices of treatment. We develop a generic basic model that measures the cost of healthcare provision based on given parameters, such as NHS and private healthcare providers' cost of investments in both sectors, cost of treatments and gained benefits. A patient's costly punishment is introduced as a mechanism to enhance cooperation among the three populations. Our findings show that cooperation can be improved with the introduction of punishment (patient's pu
The recent advancements in computing systems and wireless communications have made healthcare systems more efficient than before. Modern healthcare devices can monitor and manage different health conditions of the patients automatically without any manual intervention from medical professionals. Additionally, the use of implantable medical devices (IMDs), body area networks (BANs), and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in healthcare systems improve the overall patient monitoring and treatment process. However, these systems are complex in software and hardware, and optimizing between security, privacy, and treatment is crucial for healthcare systems as any security or privacy violation can lead to severe effects on patients' treatments and overall health conditions. Indeed, the healthcare domain is increasingly facing security challenges and threats due to numerous design flaws and the lack of proper security measures in healthcare devices and applications. In this paper, we explore various security and privacy threats to healthcare systems and discuss the consequences of these threats. We present a detailed survey of different potential attacks and discuss their impacts. Furth
In healthcare, the role of AI is continually evolving, and understanding the challenges its introduction poses on relationships between healthcare providers and patients will require a regulatory and behavioral approach that can provide a guiding base for all users involved. In this paper, we present IAC (Informing, Assessment, and Consent), a framework for evaluating patient response to the introduction of AI-enabled digital technologies in healthcare settings. We justify the need for IAC with a general introduction of the challenges with and perceived relevance of AI in human-welfare-centered fields, with an emphasis on the provision of healthcare. The framework is composed of three core principles that guide how healthcare practitioners can inform patients about the use of AI in their healthcare, how practitioners can assess patients' acceptability and comfortability with the use of AI, and how patient consent can be gained after this process. We propose that the principles composing this framework can be translated into guidelines that improve practitioner-patient relationships and, concurrently, patient agency regarding the use of AI in healthcare while broadening the discours
Understanding patients' journeys in healthcare system is a fundamental prepositive task for a broad range of AI-based healthcare applications. This task aims to learn an informative representation that can comprehensively encode hidden dependencies among medical events and its inner entities, and then the use of encoding outputs can greatly benefit the downstream application-driven tasks. A patient journey is a sequence of electronic health records (EHRs) over time that is organized at multiple levels: patient, visits and medical codes. The key challenge of patient journey understanding is to design an effective encoding mechanism which can properly tackle the aforementioned multi-level structured patient journey data with temporal sequential visits and a set of medical codes. This paper proposes a novel self-attention mechanism that can simultaneously capture the contextual and temporal relationships hidden in patient journeys. A multi-level self-attention network (MusaNet) is specifically designed to learn the representations of patient journeys that is used to be a long sequence of activities. The MusaNet is trained in end-to-end manner using the training data derived from EHRs.
Conversational AI has significant potential in the healthcare sector, but many existing systems fall short in emotional intelligence, fairness, and politeness, which are essential for building patient trust. This gap reduces the effectiveness of digital health solutions and can increase user anxiety. This study addresses the challenge of integrating ethical communication principles by designing and evaluating LunaAI, a healthcare chatbot prototype. Using a user-centered design approach informed by a structured literature review, we developed conversational scenarios that handle both routine and hostile user interactions. The system was implemented using the Google Gemini API and deployed as a mobile-first Progressive Web App built with React, Vite, and Firebase. Preliminary user testing was conducted with a small participant group, and responses were evaluated using established frameworks such as the Godspeed Questionnaire. In addition, a comparative analysis was performed between LunaAI's tailored responses and the baseline outputs of an uncustomized large language model. The results indicate measurable improvements in key interaction qualities, with average user ratings of 4.7 ou
Cancer treatment outcomes are influenced not only by clinical and demographic factors but also by the collaboration of healthcare teams. However, prior work has largely overlooked the potential role of human collaboration in shaping patient survival. This paper presents an applied AI approach to uncovering the impact of healthcare professionals' (HCPs) collaboration, captured through electronic health record (EHR) systems, on cancer patient outcomes. We model EHR-mediated HCP interactions as networks and apply machine learning techniques to detect predictive signals of patient survival embedded in these collaborations. Our models are cross validated to ensure generalizability, and we explain the predictions by identifying key network traits associated with improved outcomes. Importantly, clinical experts and literature validate the relevance of the identified crucial collaboration traits, reinforcing their potential for real-world applications. This work contributes to a practical workflow for leveraging digital traces of collaboration and AI to assess and improve team-based healthcare. The approach is potentially transferable to other domains involving complex collaboration and of
We develop Polaris, the first safety-focused LLM constellation for real-time patient-AI healthcare conversations. Unlike prior LLM works in healthcare focusing on tasks like question answering, our work specifically focuses on long multi-turn voice conversations. Our one-trillion parameter constellation system is composed of several multibillion parameter LLMs as co-operative agents: a stateful primary agent that focuses on driving an engaging conversation and several specialist support agents focused on healthcare tasks performed by nurses to increase safety and reduce hallucinations. We develop a sophisticated training protocol for iterative co-training of the agents that optimize for diverse objectives. We train our models on proprietary data, clinical care plans, healthcare regulatory documents, medical manuals, and other medical reasoning documents. We align our models to speak like medical professionals, using organic healthcare conversations and simulated ones between patient actors and experienced nurses. This allows our system to express unique capabilities such as rapport building, trust building, empathy and bedside manner. Finally, we present the first comprehensive cli
As hospitals move towards automating and integrating their computing systems, more fine-grained hospital operations data are becoming available. These data include hospital architectural drawings, logs of interactions between patients and healthcare professionals, prescription data, procedures data, and data on patient admission, discharge, and transfers. This has opened up many fascinating avenues for healthcare-related prediction tasks for improving patient care. However, in order to leverage off-the-shelf machine learning software for these tasks, one needs to learn structured representations of entities involved from heterogeneous, dynamic data streams. Here, we propose DECENT, an auto-encoding heterogeneous co-evolving dynamic neural network, for learning heterogeneous dynamic embeddings of patients, doctors, rooms, and medications from diverse data streams. These embeddings capture similarities among doctors, rooms, patients, and medications based on static attributes and dynamic interactions. DECENT enables several applications in healthcare prediction, such as predicting mortality risk and case severity of patients, adverse events (e.g., transfer back into an intensive care
The COVID-19 pandemic and other ongoing health crises have underscored the need for prompt healthcare services worldwide. The traditional healthcare system, centered around hospitals and clinics, has proven inadequate in the face of such challenges. Intelligent wearable devices, a key part of modern healthcare, leverage Internet of Things technology to collect extensive data related to the environment as well as psychological, behavioral, and physical health. However, managing the substantial data generated by these wearables and other IoT devices in healthcare poses a significant challenge, potentially impeding decision-making processes. Recent interest has grown in applying data analytics for extracting information, gaining insights, and making predictions. Additionally, machine learning, known for addressing various big data and networking challenges, has seen increased implementation to enhance IoT systems in healthcare. This chapter focuses exclusively on exploring the hurdles encountered when integrating ML methods into the IoT healthcare sector. It offers a comprehensive summary of current research challenges and potential opportunities, categorized into three scenarios: IoT
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into healthcare demands a safety paradigm rooted in \textit{primum non nocere}. However, current alignment techniques rely on generic definitions of harm that fail to capture context-dependent violations, such as administrative fraud and clinical discrimination. To address this, we introduce Medical Malice: a dataset of 214,219 adversarial prompts calibrated to the regulatory and ethical complexities of the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS). Crucially, the dataset includes the reasoning behind each violation, enabling models to internalize ethical boundaries rather than merely memorizing a fixed set of refusals. Using an unaligned agent (Grok-4) within a persona-driven pipeline, we synthesized high-fidelity threats across seven taxonomies, ranging from procurement manipulation and queue-jumping to obstetric violence. We discuss the ethical design of releasing these "vulnerability signatures" to correct the information asymmetry between malicious actors and AI developers. Ultimately, this work advocates for a shift from universal to context-aware safety, providing the necessary resources to immunize healthcare AI against the nuance
AI scribes are transforming clinical documentation at scale. However, their real-world performance remains understudied, especially regarding their impacts on patient safety. To this end, we initiate a mixed-methods study of patient safety issues raised in feedback submitted by AI scribe users (healthcare providers) in a large U.S. hospital system. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis suggest that AI scribes may induce various patient safety risks due to errors in transcription, most significantly regarding medication and treatment; however, further study is needed to contextualize the absolute degree of risk.
Without trust, patients may hesitate to engage with AI systems, significantly limiting the technology's potential in mental healthcare. This paper focuses specifically on the trust that mental health patients, as direct users, must have in AI systems, highlighting the most sensitive and direct relationship between AI systems and those whose mental healthcare is impacted by them. We explore the concept of justified trust, why it is important for patient positive care outcomes, and the strategies needed to foster and maintain this trust. By examining these aspects, we highlight how cultivating justified trust is key to unlocking AI's potential impact in mental healthcare.
In the rapidly evolving healthcare industry, platforms now have access to not only traditional medical records, but also diverse data sets encompassing various patient interactions, such as those from healthcare web portals. To address this rich diversity of data, we introduce WellFactor: a method that derives patient profiles by integrating information from these sources. Central to our approach is the utilization of constrained low-rank approximation. WellFactor is optimized to handle the sparsity that is often inherent in healthcare data. Moreover, by incorporating task-specific label information, our method refines the embedding results, offering a more informed perspective on patients. One important feature of WellFactor is its ability to compute embeddings for new, previously unobserved patient data instantaneously, eliminating the need to revisit the entire data set or recomputing the embedding. Comprehensive evaluations on real-world healthcare data demonstrate WellFactor's effectiveness. It produces better results compared to other existing methods in classification performance, yields meaningful clustering of patients, and delivers consistent results in patient similarity
Machine learning (ML) transforms healthcare by enabling predictive analytics, personalized treatments, and improved patient outcomes. However, traditional ML workflows often require specialized skills, infrastructure, and resources, limiting accessibility for many healthcare professionals. This paper explores how BigQuery ML Cloud service helps healthcare researchers and data analysts to build and deploy models using SQL, without need for advanced ML knowledge. Our results demonstrate that the Boosted Tree model achieved the highest performance among the three models making it highly effective for diabetes prediction. BigQuery ML directly integrates predictive analytics into their workflows to inform decision-making and support patient care. We reveal this capability through a case study on diabetes prediction using the Diabetes Health Indicators Dataset. Our study underscores BigQuery ML's role in democratizing machine learning, enabling faster, scalable, and efficient predictive analytics that can directly enhance healthcare decision-making processes. This study aims to bridge the gap between advanced machine learning and practical healthcare analytics by providing detailed insig
Mental health communication in India is linguistically fragmented, culturally diverse, and often underrepresented in clinical NLP. Current health ontologies and mental health resources are dominated by diagnostic frameworks centered on English or Western culture, leaving a gap in representing patient distress expressions in Indian languages. We propose cross-linguistic graphs of patient stress expressions (CL-PDE), a framework for building cross-lingual mental health ontologies through graph-based methods that capture culturally embedded expressions of distress, align them across languages, and link them with clinical terminology. Our approach addresses critical gaps in healthcare communication by grounding AI systems in culturally valid representations, allowing more inclusive and patient-centric NLP tools for mental health care in multilingual contexts.