How Can Blockchain Technology Benefit Healthcare?
Blockchain technology has left a footprint by its revolutionizing work in multiple industries. Being one of the most important and disruptive technologies of the world, it has a huge impact on the industries forcing their digitalization and transformation.
With its immense success across multiple fields, blockchain has now revolutionized the healthcare world too.
But, not everyone is familiar with blockchain technology and how it can affect healthcare. If you’re also wondering the same, this article might help you out.
So, let’s see how this technology can help healthcare sector.
· Patient Data Management
When dealing with healthcare data, the record often gets mismatched or duplicated. Besides, different EHRs have a different schema for each field, which can result in various ways of entering and manipulating the data.
However, the blockchain technology creates a hash for each PHI block along with a patient ID. With an API, the entities can receive the information without revealing the identity of the patient. Additionally, the patient can decide whom to give access.
· Data Security
Blockchain technology lets the users prove the authenticity of any document registered in the system. It provides proof-of-existence by adding data in the form of transaction and then validating the data by all system nodes. Also, this technology records immutable data.
This stores the results from clinical trials in a more secure way and makes the data impossible to modify.
· Interoperability
Interoperability is a major problem in the healthcare industry. In fact, improved interoperability is the utmost priority of policymakers, providers, and patients.
The two major areas that get affected by ineffective interoperability are the trouble of identifying patients and information blocking.
Any health care facility can easily utilize digital medical records backed by blockchain. The data is shared with authorized providers in a standardized and secure way that eliminates the cost and burden of data reconciliation.
· Health Data Accuracy
The combination of healthcare and blockchain can provide blockchain medical records. Also, the accuracy of the treatment delivered can greatly be improved with blockchain technology.
· Drug Traceability
With blockchain, it is easy to detect fraudulent drug dealers as all the blockchain’s transactions are time stamped and immutable.
Blockchain is of two types — public and private.
To ensure the high quality and authenticity of the medicines, trustworthy healthcare blockchain companies have to register the products in the private system. As these systems are moderated by central entities and only a specific distributor has access to the blockchain, it makes the process more authenticated.
The Future of Blockchain in Health Care
Considering that a large number of medical errors happen because of the mishandled data, we can expect that the blockchain technology will overcome these challenges efficiently. This technology is great in terms of handling medical data, enhancing interoperability, preventing breaches and more.
So, gaining an early insight into cryptocurrency and this technology and using it in the healthcare industry is a great idea.
But, what do you think? Do you think the same? Don’t forget to tell us about your views in the comment section below.
