Blockchain in Healthcare: Cure or Placebo?

According to the IBM survey, 56% of healthcare executives expect to adopt blockchain by 2020. How advantageous can this move be?

With so many industries being disrupted by blockchain, healthcare must be the one having the greatest chances to benefit from it. Why? Because the technology has the immense potential to cover the most cumbersome and challenging issues of the industry — poor network infrastructure and chaotic data management.

Offering transparent communication across networks and visibility into healthcare transactions, blockchain can become a core element in the adoption of value-based care. A distributed online ledger behind blockchain can boost the efficiency of the healthcare sector and change the traditional yet outdated approaches to data storage and transmission.

So, which are the actual use cases of blockchain in healthcare?

Medical Records and Interoperability

Usually, patient records are scattered and fragmented between different systems, and it’s not an easy task to access a case history as a single unit. Blockchain, however, can help to pull together every transaction from each medical system and division. This high-volume data can be then converted into a readable report on a patient’s overall condition both for their own use and for the EHR.

As a result, we get a well-structured and centralized data sheet with the possibility to further add information about procedures, diagnoses and prescriptions. Plus, blockchain can ensure only authorized individuals can access confidential data, providing patients with the visibility into and control over their medical records.

Supply Chain

As supply chains across the healthcare industry need a core reinvention and enhancement as well, blockchain solutions come in handy in this case.

Built as an unalterable account, blockchain transactions can be linked into a validated chronological train. Pharma and medtech organizations can get the most out of this model and track their recording starting from a manufacturer and ending with a consumer.

Distributed ledgers allow companies to follow the journey of medical components and materials through every step of the supply chain: parties log information with direct data entries or with the help of embedded sensors transferring the input to the trail. Since this data is unchangeable after the transfer, blockchain users can identify and validate the lifecycle to improve the supply chain efficiency if necessary.

Clinical Trials and R&D

Blockchain can drive innovation and reduce expenditures of medtech companies, streamlining their R&D. Leveraging blockchain solutions, organizations can automatically identify, coordinate and maintain clinical trials, validating patient profiles and eligibility.

The technology lets researchers gather the necessary clinical data times quicker and in more trusted ways, as blockchain-powered systems store the information in a reliable and consistent infrastructure. In their turn, patients can manage data accessibility by sharing public or private keys.

It results in reduced data preprocessing, its faster management, as well as cost-efficient and resultative completion of trials. With richer and more structured data available for the research process, companies can conduct a more complex analysis and get robust results.

Is It Secure?

Q1 2018 averaged at least 1.13M patient records exposed by 110 healthcare data breaches, according to Protenus Breach Barometer. Blockchain tech has the potential to become a silver bullet for keeping this data safe and protected: its infrastructure allows to get the most out of the connected devices, keeping them private at the same time.

Once the transaction is logged into a blockchain ledger, it’s practically impossible to alter it. Each new transaction goes through the authentication, having the information encrypted, digitally signed and stored. Getting the control over data, patients can decide who has the permission to enter their records, eliminating the risk of their data violation and theft.

Adopting Blockchain

But with so many perks and benefits of blockchain in the healthcare sector, what is the most painless and effortless method to implement this technology?

There are many frameworks and platforms helping to drive blockchain’s trust and efficiency. One of such solutions is genEOS, for example. It is a fully-fledged platform that simplifies blockchain adoption for businesses and allows creating feature-packed and secure decentralized applications.

This way, with ecosystems like genEOS, blockchain tech becomes approachable and easy-to-use for healthcare entities, medical researchers and providers, paving the way for the industry’s growth and continuous improvement.