How Blockchain can disrupt the Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is experiencing the extreme pressure to keep costs down while remaining on the competitive edge in the market.

Different healthcare units like hospitals, diagnostic labs, and health insurance companies want to ensure the right care of a patient while maintaining compliance and technological needs.

No doubt that the healthcare units are adopting the latest technology trends, but increasing number of patients make the current technologies incapable of keeping the quality standards. Due to the lack of quality and trust in the existing system, the patient’s healthcare records get hindered.

Healthcare Information Exchange is one of the major issues that may not only affect the patients but the healthcare industry as well. The Cost of Data Breach Study done by Ponemon in 2017 says that the cost of data breaches for healthcare units is calculated to be $380 per healthcare records.

This is the reason that the current healthcare market needs an innovative change to bring a vast transformation in the industry. Blockchain could be the possible solution which can reconstruct the healthcare organizations by bringing transparency, trust, and efficiency in the system.

As per the IBM’s Institute for Business Value Blockchain, 200 healthcare executives were under supervision, and 16% of them are expected to implement blockchain in healthcare for the secure sharing of healthcare records.

Let’s discuss how blockchain healthcare solution could benefit the healthcare industry.

Here’s how blockchain healthcare works:

· Storing the Healthcare Records on Blockchain:

Patients, physicians, lab technician, or any other member involved in the healthcare network can feed the data related to the patient’s health records on the blockchain. Storing the data on blockchain is essential because it maintains an immutable ledger of records which is traceable and keeps the data secure. Everyone in the network can have their own private keys to have the ownership of data.

All members of the network can access all records, but no one can manipulate or modify them due to the ability of blockchain to provide controlled-data disclosure. So, healthcare records stored on the blockchain are transparent as well as immutable.

· Sharing of Healthcare Records on Blockchain:

Since every participant of the health chain network stores the data using their private key, the data can be decrypted only by using the corresponding public key.

For example, if a patient wants to show the previous medical records to the physician, they would have to provide their public key for accessing the data.

Moreover, it would reduce the efforts of every healthcare unit to approach one another by making the entire information available through blockchain. If an insurance company wants to check the reports of a patient to generate claim amount, they will not have to ask for the complicated paper-files. Instead, they could get the public key from the patient to access their diagnostic reports.

So, in this way, the health records can be shared quickly and seamlessly.

· Smart Contracts ensuring trust:

Smart Contracts contain the vital business logic which determines who gets what. Therefore, with the help of smart contracts, it can be ensured that the quality of data will never be hindered.

Smart contracts offer a conflict-free exchange of the information and make sure that the right entity of the network consumes the data.

Believing that the distributed ledger technology like blockchain is all set to disrupt the healthcare sector and various other industries, every entrepreneur should introduce blockchain into their businesses.

Hire a skillful blockchain development company that has the potential to build blockchain healthcare for your organization.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by + 377,643 people.

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