What are the shortcomings of the existing healthcare industry?
The Healthcare industry is one of the core components of any economy across the world, and it is seeing rapid technological development. However, despite the advancements, the global healthcare systems are still plagued by inefficiencies which lead to increased costs of availing healthcare services. According to Deloitte, the Global healthcare spend is expected to reach $8.7 trillion by 2020.
Inefficient Data Management
The digitisation of health records, coupled with cloud storage have induced efficiency and cost-effectiveness in healthcare delivery. As per a study by the University of Michigan, the implementation of electronic health records (EHR) can decrease the costs of outpatient care by approximately 3 percent, compared to using traditional paper records. EHRs can also lead to fewer medical errors. However, despite the digitisation of health records, medical data of consumers is still fragmented and siloed, which makes it difficult to share it securely with the concerned stakeholders who can play a positive role in a consumer’s healthcare outcomes. In addition, despite all measures for ensuring cybersecurity and data risk management, theft of medical data is not an uncommon issue. In 2016, 27 million medical records were breached, which put sensitive medical data in the hands of hackers for potential misuse.
Clinician at the centre of a consumer’s care
While digital data storage definitely has its benefits over maintaining traditional paper-based documents and has made a significant positive difference to the way healthcare entities function, it is not a solution to all of the existing healthcare system’s shortcomings. The problem of providing holistic healthcare solutions to consumers stems from the fact that the existing healthcare systems does not always fully allow for the inclusion of all relevant healthcare providers in the delivery of necessary and targeted healthcare services, nor the ability to always see where the patient is in their recovery journey. A typical healthcare system consists of a consumer having a one-on-one interaction with a single healthcare provider. The provider is put at the centre of the consumer’s care, and this excludes other healthcare providers from contributing to the consumer’s healthcare outcomes. Partly responsible for this is the fact that the consumer’s medical data is of a sensitive nature and it is thus not easy to share it across different entities without exposing it to the risk of being hacked.
How is dClinic going to change this state of affairs?
Thus, the core of the problem is the lack of a single, secure but distributed platform, where a consumer’s medical data doesn’t exist in silos, but is collected, shared and utilized with the relevant healthcare providers that a consumer may need. dClinic recognises the significance of solving this problem to benefit the entire healthcare industry, and has come up with an innovative blockchain-powered solution. The solution entails the implementation of a Shared Care Plan to enable all care providers, including the consumer themselves, to contribute, follow and update their healthcare progress. Blockchain technology will assist in securely storing and sharing the consumer’s longitudinal healthcare record, as a Shared Care Plan, with those healthcare providers which are relevant to their healthcare outcomes. Thus, dClinic’s solution will put consumers at the centre of their care and allows them secure, consented access to a more holistic healthcare system regardless of their geography.
We will be sharing more details about dClinic’s blockchain-powered project in the blogs to come. Stay tuned.
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