Blockchain and Healthcare — why should the patients care?

With the global blockchain market in the healthcare sector all set to take off and grow at a CAGR of 63.8% by 2025, it is obvious as to how the blockchain technology will help healthcare units. But what’s in it for the patients? Let’s find out.

Patients data will be secure and cannot be easily accessed by bad actors

The decentralized mode of storing data ensures that there is no data breach that is happening at any single point. Decentralization allows for a single database containing the entire medical history of the patient to be stored on the blockchain, which all the medical stakeholders in the medical ecosystem have access to.

Blockchain ensures security through encryption wherein the data can be accessed using digital signatures that are unique to each person on the chain.

Patients will have access to complete medical history

Imagine how helpful it will be if every hospital the patient visits readily has access to all of their medical history — their ailments, medicines they have consumed, treatments they have undergone. This will significantly improve the quality of care imparted to the patient. This will also help bring down costs significantly for the patient, as they do not have to repeat tests in every institution they visit.

Blockchain can also record all the data captured via home monitoring and wearable devices and present it to the clinicians, who can include these outcomes in fine-tuning their treatment plan. This will also help other stakeholders like pharmaceuticals, insurers, researchers and the entire

healthcare ecosystem.

Patient data will be owned and controlled by them

Irrespective of who owns the blockchain setup or who pays for it, it is the patient who has control over who can gain access over their data, as identified by the terms and conditions in the smart contract.

This ensures that privacy and security of the data is maintained and is not unethically handled.

Accurate patient data as it will be saved in a single distributed database reducing the discrepancy in data

In most traditional cases, the issues of duplication and data mismatch are rampant. Also, different EHRs are stored using different formats, thereby making it impossible to concatenate them or perform any operation on them. With blockchain, the entire dataset is present on a ledger which points to a single patient record containing all the information. It serves as a one-address-point for every single piece of medical information about that patient.

Incentivisation on creating high quality data points

Patients can be incentivized via tokens built into the system. These tokens can be used for any of the following activities:

i. Participating in healthy activities like daily exercise, meditation, eating healthy and so on

ii. Completing desired activities, like showing up for appointments, completing surveys, taking their medicine and being adherent to protocols

Iii. Providing timely and accurate medical report details whenever required by a healthcare provider or a payer

The tokens thus earned can be used to subsidize gym membership, insurance plans and availing other services in the healthcare network.

It is encouraging to see new-age companies like NanoHealth already building such sophisticated ecosystem that benefits multiple stakeholders in the ecosystem — users, providers and payers. NHCT token is the main currency of this ecosystem that envisions a healthy world.

Website — https://www.nhct.io/

Telegram — https://t.me/Nanohealth

Whitepaper — https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zlD7cfcg_0TJlTVjQiaQwXbDjHkrxwM-