Blockchain technologies adoption in healthcare: Overcoming barriers amid the hype cycle to enhance patient care

Blockchain technologies are increasingly recognized as a transformative force across industries, offering potential solutions for information management, data security, and operational efficiency improvement. However, integration into the healthcare sector faces significant barriers, ranging from technical challenges to organizational resistance. In this study, a methodology is proposed that examines these critical barriers through a comprehensive analysis of 3265 academic papers and derives actionable solutions from 1566 patents published between 2016 and 2023. This approach bridges the gap between identifying challenges and implementing solutions. Using the “Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA)”, twelve critical adoption challenges are analyzed, while Top2Vec-based topic modeling identifies innovations that best address the ranked barriers. In addition to this, the proposed ‘healthcare ecosphere’ knowledge map serves as a comprehensive tool to analyze key stakeholders, their interactions, and the alignment of adoption barriers in solution spaces. The findings show that innovations in blockchain technologies are heavily concentrated in areas such as data security and application functionalities, whereas other critical domains—such as consensus mechanisms, governance, and regulatory frameworks—remain underexplored, pointing to opportunities for growth and development. The mapping of barriers to solutions provides practical guidance for healthcare providers, policymakers, and technologists seeking to implement the blockchain technologies effectively. • Identified and ranked twelve key adoption barriers from technological and social contexts using SWARA methodology. • Analyzed trends in blockchain patent grants to strategically address the barriers. • Patent documents are clustered and mapped to address barriers using machine learning approach through Top2Vec. • Noting patent grants are concentrated in specific areas of applications. • Highlighted opportunities for innovation in under-explored blockchain technology layers.