Blockchain technology has risen as a new sensation in the tech world. It has become one of the most successful inventions of this planet in the last few years. The emergence of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies has certainly helped blockchain to get into the spotlight.
Being one of the most powerful and secure technologies of the 21st century, Blockchain brings trust, transparency, speed, and clarity to digital transactions. Due to its growth potential, blockchain has disrupted almost all the industries such as finance, health, security, supply chain, banking, etc. And, the latest comes the healthcare domain.
Using Blockchain in healthcare sector is empowering innovative trends from validating medicines and protecting patient’s records and of course taking care of inconsistency, differences in data standards, and the demand to create health data interchanges.
What is Blockchain in Healthcare?
The Healthcare industry is transforming towards a patient-centric approach with a major focus on simplifying the healthcare system by developing a safe and secure environment. And, Blockchain in Healthcare today is not only tackling the booming demand of technology but also bringing immutability to the health records.
By 2025, 55 percent of all healthcare apps will have deployed blockchain for commercial purposes. And by the same year, the valuation of blockchain in healthcare will jump to $5.61 billion from the present $170 million, BIS Research suggests.
Blockchain Applications in Healthcare
Blockchain is a pool of opportunities, it maximizes safety and convenience, the technology is highly useful in different areas of the healthcare system, such as for storing and sharing sensitive medical records and remote monitoring systems, insurance information both in healthcare venues and in the mobile apps, and for clinical trials. Here are some popular Blockchain healthcare use cases you can refer.
1. Electronic Health Records
EHR is the digital transformation of paper records. There are tremendous blockchain opportunities to create decentralized models for EHR (Electronic Health Records). This EHR contains general information about the medical history of the patients in real-time.
Well, the most significant role of blockchain in EHR is that it creates one universal electronic pool(data silos) for the patient. One of the most important challenges met by the healthcare industry today is in the distribution of key medical data with stakeholders while preserving guarding patient privacy and data integrity.
2. Drug Supply Chain Tracking
This is one of the most popular Blockchain healthcare use cases in the pharmaceutical industry. A blockchain is a software that gives a digital ledger system to log and record transactions by arranging them into chronologically-ordered blocks.
One of the most prominent benefits of Blockchain technology in healthcare is the ability to create a traceable trail across the entire supply chain.
3. Direct Service Payment
Blockchain technologies work on “smart contracts”, small, auto-run programs stored on the distributed ledger that automatically do payments when particular requirements are met.
Blockchain technology ensures a fast, secure, and fair payment framework by using encrypted distributed ledgers that provide trusted real-time verification of transactions without any third-party houses. Blockchain technology in healthcare service payments speeds up international payment processing services.
4. Patient Data Management
HIPAA, Health Insurance Portability, and Accountability Act have rigid laws to protect patient’s data. This rule safeguards patient’s health information by setting limits and conditions on its usage and disclosure. Blockchain helps in segmenting and encrypting confidential data by saving high-level demographic information, Pll, and PHI. It is one of the most successful Blockchain use cases in healthcare.
4 Major Challenges of the Healthcare industry today!
With thousands of trending Blockchain app ideas in healthcare, there comes challenges. We have summed up some of the major concerns that the healthcare system is facing without blockchain technology in 2020.
To mitigate the healthcare challenges, the top Healthcare App Development Services are working in this direction by addressing the privacy and security concerns.
1. Harnessing Advanced Health Technology
Even if you see the last years, people rely more on keeping records on paper. And, they find it a lot easier to access but with digitalization a lot has been changed. To shift the workforce who is still dependent on pen and paper is not only tedious but also a time-taking process.
With everything going digital, blockchain has introduced Electronic Health Records (EHR) which is a digital version of a patient’s paper chart, that isn’t only making information available to everyone instantly, but also, an attractive way to deliver secure records to authorized users.
2. Health Data Interoperability
Often, medical agencies hide the exact costing with the insurance companies. As these companies charge differently for different patients. Hence, there is a greater chance of middle-money-making, excess funds, and dis-organized hospital records databases.
Whereas data in the blockchain is secure and immutable (un-changed). Blockchain architecture is well-structured and organized so that authorized users can easily access the data anytime.
3. Drug Traceability
Drug fraud is one of the major challenges of the pharmaceutical industry. The wrong set of ingredients are not only affecting people economically but also putting patients’ lives in danger.
According to recent figures released by the Health Research Funding Organization, around 10% to 30% of drugs sold in the developing world are fake and the underground economy is valued at around $200 billion annually.
Blockchain makes data immutable so that no one can actually make changes to the dataset at any point of time. Also, it keeps track of the complete drug manufacturing trail, so that it reduces the chances of data leakage and fraudulence. Every time a drug moves to the next step, the blockchain blocks any counterfeits and serves as a solution to this healthcare challenge.
4. Health Data Accuracy
The other two challenges of healthcare today are data accuracy and data security. Currently, sensitive data lacks a secure data structure. As a result, the healthcare industry faces data breaching and data entropy.
Till now, medical records vary from region to region, and hence accuracy can not be maintained. And hence, patients don’t receive the right treatment they need. In order to make records universally available to everyone, blockchain is revolutionizing the data accuracy challenge in healthcare with a distributed digital ledger that records transactions in a growing chain of immutable blocks. This is how Blockchain helps healthcare.
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