How can Blockchain Technology Be Beneficial to the Healthcare Industry?

Blockchain is one of the fastest-growing and advanced technologies in the world. The majority of the industries are adopting blockchain technology to innovate the way they work. One of these industries is Healthcare. Many blockchain development companies are using this technology to develop some high systems for healthcare industries. According to a survey, adopting blockchain technology can save up to $100 to $150 billion per year for the healthcare industry by 2025.

In this article, let us see how blockchain technology can help the healthcare industry.

Healthcare and Interoperability

When we talk about interoperability, it is said to be a massive problem in the healthcare industry. Here are the two major areas when it comes to ineffective interoperability.

One of the most surprising things is that there is still no universally recognized patient identifier. The fact is that the unique patient identifiers can quickly solve the problem of mismatched patient electronic health records, but we lack in keeping that record. This problem has even been expressed by Shaun Gannis, the Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI).

Information blocking is another problem in the healthcare industry. Below is a list of three criteria for identifying information blocking:

Blockchain helps in solving both these problems by keeping a perfect record of the patients’ data.

Disease Surveillance at Community Level

Surveillance is all about a systematic, collation, analysis of data, ongoing collection, and distribution of information to those who need to know about it to take action.

This can be done for both non communicable and communicable diseases by all the national health systems, according to WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR).

For instance, deadly viruses like Coronavirus have caused a pandemic in recent times by compromising health security due to its rapid growth.

The surveillance of infectious diseases is an inefficient, complex, and ongoing process. This is because a massive number of self-regulating organizations report to a centralized information system.

Blockchain at Hospital Level

Blockchain is said to be one of the most powerful technologies that can be used for EMR in modern hospital ecosystems. There are several features, including data provenance, robustness, and decentralization, that have made blockchain technology the best solution for managing, storing, and sharing the information of EMR.

For instance, hyperledger fabric by IBM is used in the health chain of blockchain-based EMR systems. This technology helps in optimizing the performance of the EMR system and in achieving scalable data security.

Conclusion

In all the above mentioned three phases, if blockchain technology is used correctly, it can help in automatically securing the data-sharing systems and in storing the data at different levels of healthcare organizations. Besides this, blockchain technology can be used in various other healthcare industries like medicines and drugs. If you want to develop an app using blockchain technology, contact the blockchain developers of OpenXcell, the blockchain development company.