Impact of COVID-19 on Primary Health Care Research Trends and Suggestions for Better Services Approaches Via Blockchain Based Applications

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted society in numerous ways, including academic efforts and outputs. Primary health care (PHC) research is no exception, and academics around the world worked quickly to focus on containing this novel virus, exploring changes in healthcare delivery to support the pandemic response. Our objective is to assess how PHC research was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and identify the potential of blockchain technology in addressing pandemic-related challenges. This is a quantitative bibliometric research study using machine learning techniques. A comprehensive analysis of all PHC research was conducted using bibliometric data from the Web of Science. We examined co-authorship, co-occurrences, citation and co-citation, thematic mapping, factorial, document, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic analyses. Our main dataset is 1,885 articles produced by 9,185 researchers from 3,132 institutions in 113 countries. The most cited studies in the PHC field during the pandemic are related to telemedicine, remote consultation, mental health during the pandemic, diabetes, vaccination, risks for pregnant and elderly people, the impact of COVID-19 on educational outcomes, changes to the organization of care, experiences, and challenges of PHC physicians and health professionals, and the diversity of COVID-19 symptoms. PHC researchers quickly adapted to the pandemic and conducted multidisciplinary research that helped to mitigate the impact on individuals, health systems, and society. Within this context, blockchain technology can be used to facilitate the security of health data, resource management (e.g., monitoring of the vaccine supply chain), and global collaboration toward pandemic control. By providing transparency, security, and efficiency in these areas, blockchain technology may lead to more effective pandemic preparedness and management in the future.