Why Remain Paper-based When You Can Blockchain-enable Medical Records?
By Jojy Azurin, mediXserve founder and CEO
In countries where most medical records are still kept in cabinets, the quality of a doctor’s diagnosis is limited by the paper-based diagnostic results the patient brings to the clinic. Consider a scenario where the patient fails to bring all the test results. The conversation could go like this:
Doctor: “Your Chem12 result is missing here.”
Patient: “Oh, it’s not in the batch of papers I gave you?” (Checks his envelope for the missing paper.)
Doctor: “Let me check if I can access your results online. When did you have your test taken in this hospital?” (Opens laptop to access the hospital’s electronic medical records system).
Patient: “Uh…Doc, I had my tests done in another hospital.”
Doctor: “Oh,” (Closes laptop.) “In that case, you need to come back with that test result. Let’s see…can you see me again next week?”
This highlights a pain point of patients, particularly those in rural areas: The delivery of paper-based results depends on every patient’s due diligence (or lack of).
While smart phones have made it possible for patients to show doctors a copy of their laboratory results, the fact remains that the doctor’s copy of the patients’ records (usually kept inside folders) remains incomplete — unless the patient diligently prints a hardcopy of every related medical history, physical examination result, physician order, laboratory report, and consultation report done on him in every hospital he went to.
And Then There Is Blockchain
I have barely scratched the surface as we are simply talking here of the inconvenience of paper-based records.
Another huge issue exists in the digital space, where electronic health record (EHR) vendors and distributors abound. Digital records, more often than not, are stymied by the silo-ed nature of different hospitals’ databases. That is, a patient needs to access his records from Hospital A and Hospital B to be able to give them to his doctor in Hospital C.
Blockchain, a technology known for its distributed and shared ledger approach, has the potential to solve some of the issues in EHR. Among these are:
- Interoperability — unlike existing EHR software and systems that are proprietary assets, blockchain is built on the principle of interoperability. That is, it welcomes interaction among different groups or enterprises and institutions (consortiums, in short) in a secured ecosystem.
- Empowered Patient — some traditional EHR systems only confine their products to health service providers. Patients do not have access rights to all their records within the facility.
Blockchain on the other hand, can engage patients into its ecosystem, giving them in fact, the power over all their respective healthcare records with the members of the consortium.
- “One record of truth” — In their interaction in a private blockchain, all the members of the ecosystem (institutions, businesses, healthcare professionals, and patients) transact but are always required by the technology to agree on one record of truth. This is all about reaching a consensus.
Are We Now In the Blockchain Era?
Acceptance of blockchain and its role in business might be nearer than what most think. In the recently released 2018 Price Waterhouse Cooper Blockchain Survey on 600 business executives in 15 regions (of which 31% work in firms with revenues of over $1 billion yearly), 84% have been found to be already involved in a blockchain project at varied stages.
Of those engaged in blockchain, the biggest percentage (32%) are in the development stage, while 5 percent had their blockchain up and running.
What is particularly interesting in the results is that while the executives expressed concerns with this nascent technology — i.e., concerns over, say, regulatory uncertainty and even their trust in blockchain’s ability to bring networks together — they nonetheless had already jumped in and immersed themselves in the technology.
Statista also provides data on the expected flurry of activities in the near future: “By 2020, 25% of blockchain-enabled health systems will be commercially deployed while production proof of blockchain as a test case will rise from 35% from 2017 to 45% in 2020”.
So, it is not a matter of if blockchain will be mainstreamed; it is a matter of when.
Jorge “Jojy” Azurin is the CEO of mediXserve. To learn more about health-tech company mediXserve, check out our website medixserve.com or Facebook page, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
