The Healthcare Industry and the Blockchain Disruption
Technology disruption in the last decades has brought havoc to several industries including retail, automotive and services in general. The healthcare industry has been slow at keeping up the pace, since established private groups and institutions have been resisting to the overall technological disruption, and still working with obsolete and inefficient processes. Obviously, the big pharma giants haven’t given up on pharmaceutical innovations, which permit them to have an edge on competitors, yet everything about product tracking and distribution hasn’t seen any advancement in decades.
Health institutions instead, have gradually become inefficient giants, with a slow rate of data process, lack of transparency, and without an established system which would permit the safe and rapid share of personal health data that, in some cases, might translate in a question of life or death.
However, the healthcare industry will be soon interested in technological innovations involving blockchain, AI, and IoT systems.
Wearable Devices and IoT
Researchers forecast the wearable medical devices market will reach $14.41 billion by 2022, up from $6.22 billion in 2017. Until now, these devices have been limited to individual fitness trackers that communicate with smartphone Apps, yet they will likely offer almost real-time access to medical records as well as diagnostic and treatment functionalities. This could help empower patients to take control of their health, improving it and saving healthcare providers costs and time.
In order to make this shift, medical device manufacturers, health care records system providers, IT developers, and regulators in charge of health information will need to learn how to integrate patient-generated data into their processes and devices. Privacy concerns, as well as overall security, data relevancy, and big data processing are the biggest challenges facing the extensive adoption of clinically relevant personal health devices. IT managers and developers in the healthcare industry will need to rely on Internet of Things (IoT) application programming interfaces (APIs) and standardization methods to handle these immense, unstandardized user-generated data.
AI in the Healthcare Industry
AI and cognitive computing technologies will be able to elaborate and integrate patient-generated and IoT big data streams. These technologies make use of sophisticated algorithms to elaborate large datasets, recognize patterns, and make connections between diverse items in ways that resemble the human mind. Eventually, developers can tie these cognitive computing platforms to electronic health records to catch trends not only within a single patient’s records but also across patients in order to help doctors recognize anomalies as well as diagnose and treat patients presenting similar conditions.
AI is also likely to play an important role in researching and developing treatments for many pathologies. Using large data repositories, these AI systems can store incredible quantities of data generated through IoT, health care systems, wearable medical devices, and more to get a deeper insight into some of the most serious health issues such as autism, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and heart disease. Health care providers, IT decision-makers, and developers alike will have to cooperate to develop big data collecting methods and analytical tools to take the best advantage of the incredible benefits from machine learning and AI.
The Pivotal Role of Blockchain on the Healthcare Industry
Another important technology transforming health care today is blockchain. Basically a network of distributed and replicated databases contain transaction records stored on an encrypted ledger. Blockchain doesn’t have a central administrator, users can alter only the blocks of records they have access to, and algorithms time-stamp any entries or updates and syncs them across the other networked databases. Because of the massive amounts of data coming from the health care industry as well as the ever increasing need for security and respect for privacy regulations, blockchain offers great potential for many areas of the industry, including clinical data privacy, secure patient medical record storage, supply chain integrity, drug development as well as medical billing. Although still in its first stage, blockchain will likely have a significant impact on the health care industry.
As technology continues to revolutionize the health care field, both patients and providers will likely benefit from better diagnostic techniques, research, record keeping, treatments, security, and more. Only by keeping the pace with these technological advancements will software developers and IT operators find opportunities to optimize their health care software projects to integrate with and take advantage of blockchain, AI, IoT and wearables, allowing them to offer medical advantages to their patients and stay ahead of the competition.
On public blockchains, all parties may check the records. On permission-only blockchains, privacy can be assured by agreement about which parties can view the transactions, by masking the identity of the users involved.
In this way, blockchains will shift from disparate bits of information held by a single provider or owner, to the lifetime history of an asset, in this case medical records. This would be especially true if the asset is a patient’s health record or a box of pills as it moves through the supply chain.
The Bottos’ Place in the Health Industry
With the popularity of facial recognition, fingerprint data analysis applications, and methods of genetic data detection and analysis, more and more people are worried about the serious consequences of personal health data leakage. Bottos can prevent this through encryption, digital signatures, distributed intelligent storage, and community governance. When the value data is hashed and placed on the blockchain, only authorized people can access the data on the static node with digital signature technology.
Users can manage their digital assets with Bottos, such as personal electronic medical records (electronic format photo & image data, etc.), which can be uploaded on users local nodes with private keys access restriction, avoiding legal restrictions on personal medical data. Another example is personal genetic sequencing, which can be completed with distributed computing resources on Bottos at lower costs.
The Bottos AI ecosystem will also give a smart touch in managing and correctly distributing all the data on the network, increasing security and overall efficiency.
New technologies together with Bottos will further enhance the coming of a new age in the health care industry that will improve the lives of patients and facilitate the work of doctors.
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