Blockchain technology has been the talk of the block for quite some time now. It has taken a variety of the globe’s industries by storm over the course of recent years, while at the same time building up a large amount of hype, for healthcare included.
There are many ways through which the use of Blockchain technology in healthcare can yield positive results for the industry as a whole. Throughout this text, we will go over uses of the tech and how it intertwines with healthcare.
Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: What Is It?
Many of the current issues experienced by the healthcare industry can be absolved with the help of Blockchain technology. They are related to medical data (security, interoperability, accessibility), medical research, clinical trials, medical supply chain, and drug integrity. Such issues can cause problems even in the top healthcare companies.
Blockchain can change healthcare because of its ability to provide unprecedented data efficiency. Besides, it provides data access flexibility, interconnection, transparency, and security. Blockchain technology and healthcare go together well. Let’s see how the healthcare industry can improve with the help of Blockchain technology solutions.
Major Healthcare Problem Today
Nowadays the majority of health care institutions use outdated and inconvenient methods for dealing with medical data. They are various e-health records, prescription drug data, insurance information, patient medical data. Such data handling influences patient treatment and the speed of it. The whole situation is getting worse because most medical facilities in the health care sector have their own methods for storing and accessing medical data.
These practices deal blows to transparency between medical facilities, insurance providers, and patients. They open up room for severe, and even deadly, medical errors. These errors are the leading causes of death for heart disease and cancer patients in the United States. Imagine what is going on in nations that do not have as well-developed infrastructure as the US?
Patient medical data is spread across many medical facilities, insurance providers, and doctors. Today, a patient’s medical records and history are sort of like puzzles. This jumbling of data leads to loss of integrity and accuracy. This especially concerns drug prescriptions, health recipes, and diagnostics. All of these factors impact proper treatment.
Problems in getting proper patient data can sometimes even mean the difference between life and death. Nowadays, no universal method for storing data exists and there are no appropriate standards set in place. Thus, Blockchain and healthcare can come together to improve healthcare applications.
Blockchain Opportunities for Health Data
The use of Blockchain technology in healthcare can make a world of difference for data management. The tech can make the exchange of medical data more efficient, secure, and transparent across the health care sector as a whole.
Blockchain technology can help establish Blockchain medical records. This carves away unnecessary administrative costs and also allows for proper health data utilization. Additionally, the use of the tech can reduce the need to turn to various intermediaries to oversee the exchange of vital health data.
As mentioned before, a single patient’s medical data can be split across many facilities, care givers, and insurance providers. This means that a patient’s entire medical history is often blurry or incomplete. Digital medical records stored on a Blockchain could help parties in the health care sector put all the pieces of the health data puzzle together. Thus, data on each patient, the prescriptions they’ve acquired, treatments completed, facilities used, and other information would always be up-to-date and digestible by anyone involved in the process.
By using Blockchain technology in healthcare, treatment providers would always have a complete picture of any given patient’s medical record. It’s important to remember and understand that in a Blockchain and healthcare ecosystem, all past health data is immutable, and all changes to this data are visible.
Appropriate medical data management is one of the key advantages to Blockchain and healthcare. Many issues affecting the healthcare industry, such as interoperability, data completion, fraud, and even data loss during a disaster, can be eliminated.
It is indeed worth noting that Blockchain technology can do wonders in terms of disaster recovery. Since health data wouldn’t be stored in a single location, there wouldn’t be a main failure point. If any given medical facility collapses due to an earthquake, fire, flood, asteroid strike, or any other natural disaster – health data would be safe.
The ability to ensure that health data is correct is critical for the provision of appropriate medical services. Access to proper medical data ensures that health care providers are able to provide proper diagnostics. This is further strengthened by the fact that, once any data hits a Blockchain, any alterations to it become nearly impossible. It is worth noting that medical data can be stored in a Blockchain from various sources like patient documentation, wearables, handheld devices, labs, EMR’s, and so forth. Blockchain for healthcare can aid in cutting the costs of medical companies.
Another great area in the health care sector where Blockchain and healthcare can see use is drug traceability - not only prescription traceability but counterfeit drugs as well. All data entered into a Blockchain is immutable and time stamped. This reduces the possibility for counterfeit drugs to hit the black market, in addition to prescription mishandling.
In this article you can get full information on the benefits of the use of Blockchain technology in the healthcare industry.