Why Healthcare Providers should care about Blockchain

The current healthcare industry is under enormous pressure to make health care affordable and provide quality service to all. The healthcare industry is a complex system with interconnected entities that has given birth to numerous challenges at every point in the system like cyber attacks and fraud, mismanaged supply chain, fragmented data, untimely access to patient data, interoperability and cost-effectiveness.

Blockchain as a technology can help solve most of the above-mentioned challenges faced by the healthcare industry. This technology is built on a distributed architecture that does not require multiple levels of authentication, and at the same time, provides authentic, up-to-date data instantly.

Let us look at some of the ways blockchain can be a miracle-solution for healthcare providers.

Medical Data Management

One of the biggest challenges faced by the medical industry is poorly managed data. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are stored in multiple formats that are incompatible with each other, and therefore, have to be saved as separate files on the system. There is no coordination between the various stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem, resulting in patient data being fragmented amongst the stakeholders.

With Blockchain’s distributed ledger technology, all data pertaining to a patient is present on one uniform database on the ledger. This database is accessible by all the stakeholders involved. This ensures that the data is up-to-date, relevant, and collaborative to ensure the patient receives a comprehensive healthcare solution.

Billing and Claims Management

The process of filing and processing medical claims related to patient diagnosis and treatment is called billing and claims management. Healthcare institutions suffer great monetary losses every year due to manipulation of patient records and improper and fraudulent claims. Blockchain technology allows for auditability and traceability, thereby decreasing the number of fraudulent claims.

Data security

With IoT, data is easily available across multiple electronic platforms. This leads to a lot of data breaches and data security issues. This challenge can be overcome using blockchain as a solution. Blockchain when coupled with IoT devices, successfully captures critical patient data whilst not allowing any unauthorized access. The control over who gets to access the medical data lies with the patient, thus, making the patient the owner of her data.

Medical Research

Frauds and errors in the clinical trial records can be significantly reduced by adopting blockchain-enabled and time-stamped immutable records of all trials, experiments, protocols, and results. Blockchain combined with AI neural networks will create a huge repository of patient information. This information will be highly authentic and reliable as it is keyed in by the patients themselves. As the dataset grows, better predictions and innovations can be made in the field of medicine, and these findings can help medical researchers save a lot of time and money.

Cost-effectiveness

Blockchain technology helps in providing significant cost savings by streamlining the tracking and management of billions of medical devices and wearables.

It also helps in reducing administrative costs for providers and payers by getting rid of middlemen and intermediaries. By eliminating third parties and middlemen, a significant saving can be made on commissions, sales, and operations as well. Cost savings can also be made on data reconciliation, resulting in seamless health data exchange across health systems.

Blockchain also helps in creating interoperability, patient centricity, and timely access to patient data. Now, let us look at the benefits for each specific healthcare stakeholder:

Doctors/ Care providers

• Complete and comprehensive view of the patient’s health records
• Helps in effective management of emergency situations
• Better collaboration with other stakeholders and research communities
• Safe transfer of data

Pharma/ Research companies

• Keep a check on the drug supply chain by enhancing traceability
• Manage IP and R&D transactions securely on blockchain
• Reduce costs by optimizing marketing efforts
• Access to a large repository of anonymous patient data

Hospitals and Clinics

• Seamless health data exchange among all stakeholders
• Provide holistic treatment through a patient-centric approach
• Improve revenue cycle management and reduce payment disputes
• Use smart contracts for authentication and authorization

It can be seen that adopting blockchain in the healthcare ecosystem comes with many benefits. While it may not be the ultimate cure for all problems, it certainly will help mitigate most challenges to a significant degree. Blockchain is slowly becoming a mainstream technology in a lot of different industries, and it is imperative that the healthcare sector also reaps its benefits while the tide is still young.

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