How Blockchain could be a Game Changer in Healthcare Management: A Dynamic Duo
The directions in which blockchain technology is evolving, health care holds a prominent position. And there are a number of good reasons for its prominence. Companies in health care and other industries are already testing waters and developing solutions on Blockchain.
The problem is not small: The Washington-based International Policy Network says over 7 lakh people die every year across the world due to the consumption of fake or spurious drugs.
A recent report by the World Health Organization estimates that 20 per cent of all drugs sold in India are fake. It also states that 35 per cent of all the counterfeit drugs sold worldwide originate from India — a damning statistic given the country’s rapidly developing pharma sector.
India’s pharma market is the world’s third largest in terms of volume, and is valued at $25 billion, of which counterfeit drugs account for over $5 billion.
Prescription tracking is a very good use-case for deploying a blockchain-based solution. As digitised patient information is still not utilised to the best of its abilities and results in procedural repetitions incurring both costs and time, a decentralised medical prescription tracking system can help in streamlining the process. As per the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), between 2000–2014, while the GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity (PPP) grew by 121%, the average medical expenditure grew by 176%. That’s almost 60 percentage points more. Reportedly, switching to a digital set-up is projected to save nearly $400 billion annually.
Major Problem in the Recent scenario — Improper mechanism to verify Medical prescriptions.
“If we had been working the way offline pharmacies work, growth would have been 100% more because 45–50% of our orders are rejected due to invalid prescriptions. This doesn’t happen in the offline world. Growth has been a little slower because of adhering to strong regulations,” said Dharmil Sheth, co founder of PharmEasy
Also Government not supporting e-pharmacies as much as other e-commerce platforms in other domains.
- Substance Abuse
- Multiple ordering of same medicines from different e-pharmacies online.
- People preferring Prescription Drugs Over Narcotics
Solution — Medical prescription tracking system on Hyperledger Blockchain for connecting e-pharmacies and doctors/clinics/hospitals.
Build a transparent and secure medicine prescription mechanism on Blockchain to easily and securely share prescriptions records between clinics/hospitals and e-pharmacies thus creating a trusted network of both parties. The prescriptions will be stored on blockchain in real time as soon as it is prescribed and e-pharmacies will be on the same network as a node. Thus, patients will simply authenticate themselves(through biometric/otp) and his/her prescription can be automatically read by e-pharmacies through blockchain without violating privacy of patient.
This will solve 2 major issues -
Easy buying of medicines online for patients without uploading prescriptions thus solving the issue of E-pharmacies rejecting orders due to unclear or invalid prescriptions.
The consortium of multiple e-pharmacies will keep a check on people trying to buy medicines without prescriptions or using same prescription to buy multiple times and thus stop substance abuse.
The doctor will prescribe medicine to patients. The prescription will be noted on Blockchain and the system will automatically transfer the newly formed request to all it’s partner e-pharmacies.This system ensures authenticity and prevents frauds.
Concept — Run a pilot program and Build a transparent and secure medical prescription mechanism in a way that it makes easy for patients to buy medicines from e-pharmacies without worrying about their orders getting rejected or their medical data being distributed without their consent. By collaborating with Medical professional seeking apps like Practo, the blockchain ecosystem will act as a bridge and ensure transition of data — where doctors and e-pharmacies act as nodes, entering medical records on the blockchain. The immutable and distributed ledger technology of blockchain ensures that user privacy is completely maintained, avoiding cases of fake or low quality drugs. This ecosystem will check substance abuse by completely eradicating sales of habit-forming drugs along with creating a medical record history of each patient.
How this ecosystem works ?
The doctor writes the prescription digitally and this data is stored on the blockchain network. The user is then presented with options on the app to find the pharma company that is selling the particular medicine. By presenting a user ID ( biometric/hash) the pharma will then supply the medicine, storing this information again on the blockchain network so further utilisation of that particular prescription is not possible. The user reaps the benefits of huge discounts by e-pharma companies, giving increased revenues to epharma companies and doctors.
Use Cases -
- Eliminating the need to upload prescriptions
- Reducing the number of orders getting rejected due to unclear or invalid prescriptions
- Enables user to get all prescriptions from one platform
- Eliminate Substance abuse
- Authentic and Audited medical records
- Avoid medicine frauds
In Long term It will be a network of all e-pharmacies, doctors, hospitals and aggregators ( Practo) to generate authenticate and audited medical record history along with ear cycle of of buying drugs online and eliminating frauds, and fake drugs..
Advantages —
E-Pharmacies — This sector is new and growing in India. Due to lack of proper prescription methods, most people still cannot use e-pharmacies because they have very fixed set of rules to approve the prescriptions.
Hemant Bhardwaj, CEO of Zigy an online medicine seller said “ They had cancelled as much as 80% of its orders due to invalid prescriptions. Because of this, they end up going to their neighbouring pharmacy stores.”
As the goal is to totally eradicate manual prescription over a period of time, it will be very easy for e-pharmacies to approve the prescriptions as it will be on blockchain.
Hospitals — This data can help them keep a track of their operations. As most doctors in hospitals are visiting doctors and they are available for check-ups for a limited hours in a week, this data can be used to optimize the time of their doctors.
Doctor aggregator platforms like Practo.
Insurance companies — By sharing prescription data and medical health record history of patients securely with Insurance companies ( without revealing patient information), Insurance companies can frame customized insurance plans and patients can get their health insurance at better premium.
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for our next Article to track and trace drugs using Blockchain and Also do check out our earlier blog posts.
At QuillHash, we understand the Potential of Blockchain and have a good team of developers who can develop any blockchain applications like Smart Contracts, dApps, DeFi, DEX on the any Blockchain Platform like Ethereum, EOS , Stellar and Hyperledger.
For further discussion and queries on the same topic, join the discussion on Telegram group of QuillHash — https://t.me/quillhash.
