Putting Medical Records on Blockchains Can Save Both Time and Money
By Michael Dershem, CEO of MAPay
The lack of organization around patient medical data can have devastating effects in emergencies, and in less urgent situations can still lead to incorrect diagnoses. In an age of digital information, it’s imperative that medical data be organized, consistent, and complete. Storing patient information on a blockchain can make this happen by providing an immutable and secure ledger for medical records to be edited, transferred, and viewed by professionals.
People have a right to access all their medical data. However, there are often inconsistencies or flat-out errors in patients’ records. On top of that, some hospitals can take months or years to provide a patient with their requested information, and it can end up being outdated or incorrect. If the data was stored on a blockchain, it could take less than a second to retrieve that information. With this technology, patients and professionals can retrieve complete medical records without all the fees and hassle typically associated with the retrieval process.
The medical industry has laid the groundwork for a solution to be realized, but they are still dependent upon inefficient, incumbent services to establish patient identity. Provider-to-provider identities are also not readily facilitated in today’s health systems, which creates administrative and cost burdens. These shortcomings are due to numerous legacy technical and business complexities including, yet not limited to, costs, competition, and privacy issues surrounding industry interoperability. Blockchain technology allows for the innovation of providing verifiable identities via a digital ledger.
The implementation of medical records with blockchain technology has been a heavily discussed topic, with its first mention in 2014. There has been criticism against blockchain medical records, with the main argument being that centralized systems could have the same effect as a decentralized system. But data breaches and hacks show that to be untrue. The current healthcare system is vulnerable to attacks, “such as the WannaCry attack in 2017 that affected computers in 80 of the 236 NHS trusts, along with more than 250,000 computers in 150 countries. More recently, an attack on SingHealth, Singapore’s main healthcare group, compromised the data of 1.5 million Singaporean citizens.”
Using blockchain to prevent data breaches, companies and hospitals end up spending less on digital security, and can instead focus on allocating resources toward innovation. A 2018 report from BIS Research estimates that blockchain can save the healthcare industry up to $100 billion in operational costs annually by 2025:
“The use of blockchain for healthcare data exchange will contribute the largest market share throughout the forecast period, reaching a value of $1.89 billion by 2025, owing to the use of blockchain to solve the most widespread problem in healthcare information systems related to interoperability and non-standardization that has created data silos in the industry.”
A 2018 study from Yale investigated whether U.S. hospitals were compliant with regulations in their medical records request processes. It found many major hospitals take longer than seven days to release records after a request is made, with 21 percent taking less than seven days, while the remaining 79 percent took from seven days to over a month. Additionally, there can be hefty fees associated with the retrieval of medical records, something that patients should have free access to. “For a 200-page record, the cost of release as communicated in telephone calls ranged from $0.00 to $541.50.”
The study concluded: “Requesting medical records remains a complicated and burdensome process for patients despite policy efforts and regulation to make medical records more readily available to patients. Our results revealed inconsistencies in information provided by medical records authorization forms and by medical records departments in select US hospitals, as well as potentially unaffordable costs and processing times that were not compliant with federal regulations.”
It’s clear that timely and efficient record retrieval is crucial, especially in urgent situations. If records aren’t received in a timely manner, there could be errors or complications in the treatment of a patient. Using a blockchain to store healthcare records can lower the cost of storage and reduce the time it takes to transfer data. When medical data is more organized, patients and their providers benefit, and researchers are able to better assess public health and work on solutions that drive healthcare forward. Blockchain will transform healthcare to humancare.
