Crypto Academy | Season 4 Week 3. Homework Post for |@yohan2on| - Blockchain Technology in the Healthcare industry

Hi buddies and welcome again. It has been an awesome experience going through the lectures of our dear professor @yohan2on and I will undertake the homework here.

Question: Research and Discuss the potential applications of Blockchain in the Health care industry

Since the inception of Blockchain technology, a lot of advances have been made in it and we have seen its applications in very many fields of human endeavour. The reasons for the mass adoption of Blockchain in other fields are because of the many features and advantages of Blockchain which includes: immutabilty, distributed ledger, smart contracts, decentralisation, enhanced security, consensus.

Now, we will look at how all these features will come into play to improve the healthcare sector with practical examples of some already-introduced Blockchain healthcare projects.

Blockchain applications in healthcare

Healthcare industry is basically tasked with the provision of medical care or assistance to individuals or community. Obviously, you will agree with me that access to healthcare is one of the fundamental rights of the citizens, just like it is said: "a healthy nation is a wealthy nation". However, there have been many bottlenecks to the effective delivery of enhanced healthcare services. As a result of this, the option of incorporating Blockchain into the medical field became a panacea for this challenges.

Having this in mind, now let us talk about the areas in the medical industry where Blockchain will come in handy, with some examples:

1. Medical supplies transparency and drug traceability

This era has been ladened with the effects of drug counterfeiting, particularly in the pharmaceutical field. This has led to harms being perpetrated to the people that consume these drugs and other medical supplies. According to this report by World Health Organisation, in Africa alone, a whopping 280,000 infants die as a result of usage of fakes drugs (this does not include adults).

Furthermore, monies have been lost in the medical field as a result of patronising substandard medical supplies and devices. How will Blockchain come into play here?

Firstly, for companies that produce drugs and other medical supplies, in order to prevent bad actors from counterfeiting their products, they will have to register their products (drugs, etc) on Blockchain. By doing this, a hash is produced for each unit of drug production. This hash will contain the necessary information about the drug and the manufacturers which can also be verified by the consumers.

More so, this will also provide traceability for the drugs from the point of production up to the final distribution and sales of the product. Many medical Blockchain projects have risen to provide drug traceability and they include the very popular Farmatrust.

Farmatrust is a leading Blockchain service system that basically provides medical professionals and the industry with an automated and Blockchain-based information about drugs and their supply chain.

Features of Farmatrust

Many things have distinguished Farmatrust and made it uniquely different and here's a list of them.

• Flexibility and future-proof: This system provides an easy way whereby the services rendered can be accessed from anywhere and by anyone throughout the globe. More so, during the pandemic and post-pandemic era, Farmatrust included "vaccination solution" as part of their services.

• Security: Confidentiality between medical manufacturers, suppliers and end-users are put into consideration as information and other sensitive data cannot be divulged to the third-party without adequate authorisation.

• Transparency and Immutabilty: Obviously, this is one of the futures of Blockchain. This means that the data about a drug that has been saved in Blockchain cannot be altered by bad actors.

• Digitalisation: With this service, access to medical products will be a whole lot easier because it is no longer on paper like the traditional way but now in digital and distributed ledger.

2. Patients management and health records

One of the challenges facing the healthcare service providers is in the area of data management. This is so worrying that a lot of data about patients would pile up and oftentimes leading to computational errors which can lead to other forms of errors. A survey by John Hopkins Hospital US revealed that medical errors contribute to the top-3 causes of death in United States, as indicated in the graph below.

In view of this, leveraging on the features of Distributed Ledger Technology, patients' data and medical history can be uploaded on the Blockchain and then a Hashing algorithm can be provided to access these records. These records will also include drug prescriptions. While accessing a medical services like consultation, the person's data will easily be gotten. More so, the doctor's prescription will go directly to the same Blockchain data. With this, even when the patient goes to visit the pharmacy, the attendant can easily get the prescription from the database and the event of medical errors will be curtailed.

Now one may ask "which Blockchain project provides this service?" One of the most popular ones is the MedicalChain.

Features of MedicalChain

The service provided by the MedicalChain, as indicated in their official website include:

• Real-time patient medical update: MedicalChain provides an interface for the updating of patients' details from anywhere in the world. In the event that a patient consults with a particular medical professional and decides to relocate, the next medical professional can easily get access to the medical history of the patient with the details of the previous doctors that have handled the patient.

• Virtual consultation: This is a particularly new addition to MedicalChain. During the pandemic era of 2020, having physical access to health professionals was hampered. The introduction of virtual consultation became imminent. With MedicalChain, doctors would have already had access to the medical record of the patient, so it will be very easy to conduct online medical consultation and advices through virtual proxy.

• Access to medical insurance: In the event where a patient seeks access to insurance as regards to health, MedicalChain provides an interface where patients can get the services of medical insurers from the comfort of their mobile gadgets.

3. Testing and clinical trials

When a new medical product (like drug) is about to be introduced to the market, there is a need for systematic reviews of some randomised trials. One of the purposes of this trial is to ascertain the effectiveness, efficiency and tolerance of the drug in a specific sample space.

During the clinical trials, a large amount of data is generated from hypothesis and whatnot, which will make it extremely difficult to quickly determine the authenticity of these data. More so, someone can just wake up and change the documents in the database. However, when this is hosted on the Blockchain, immutabilty becomes the watchword. The Blockchain protocol for this particular service is the proof-of-existence. That means, when new data are being added in the database, the existing nodes will have to agree in one. Furthermore, it will be practically impossible for the existing information to be altered. The two well-known Blockchain solutions for these are: Curisium and Chronicled.

Advantages of Blockchain applications in healthcare

• Easier access for patients to get good medical attention and the ease of medical records being accessible by health workers.

• For the fact that data saved in Blockchain remains immutable, patients can comfortably transmit their data to anyone without the fear of tempering or altering them.

• Incentivisation via Blockchain. Reward mechanisms can also be introduced (maybe in form of tokens or cryptocurrencies) that will be used to reward excellent behaviours. For example, a health worker can be rewarded with tokens for being exceptional dedicated to his duty. Or a patient can be rewarded for sharing his data for medical research or rewarded for completing a drug prescription.

• Reduction in the rate of drug counterfeiting and improvement on the quality of medical supplies. Obviously, since there is transparency in supply-chain, it will be difficult for bad actors to perpetrate their heinous crimes.

Potential downturns, challenges and CONs of health Blockchain applications

• High computational power: Some Blockchains required extreme computational dexterity, like the ones involving PoW (Proof-of-work), which will pose serious difficulty for organisations that have limited resources as regards to computational power. Some Blockchains also use up a large amount of electricity to power the various supernodes, and it will be impracticable for places with high electricity tariff.

• Even though Blockchain is secured and has enhanced security, it is not entirely private. Most times, patients' sensitive data can be read by others that are not supposed to, thereby revealing classified information to the public.

• The challenge of storage space may arise when the data becomes excessively high. Some Blockchains support only a limited amount of space per block and may not be feasible for large data storage.

Conclusion

Since the inception of Blockchain, it has brought many applications in various fields of human endeavours. One of these applications is in the effective and efficient healthcare delivery. Access to good healthcare has remained among the top priorities of humans and as such, advances have been made to improve this field.

It is worthy to note that the healthcare system has been ladened with inherent challenges. We have considered these challenges and how Blockchain will provide a panacea to these challenges. With Blockchain, the issues of counterfeiting, security, transparency, and clinical trials will be taken care of.

Thanks all for reading, and special appreciation to @yohan2on

Thanks for reading