Blockchain is an overarching technology that is disrupting operations of various industries like healthcare, real estate, financial services, and more. Since the last decade, blockchain applications have revolutionized every aspect of business, from accounting to marketing and operations. The technology offers outstanding consensus and immutability characteristics motivating enough for businesses to transform their existing business models.
It has become a buzzword in the medical technology field as it holds the potential to revolutionize healthcare. The Healthcare industry is among the largest enterprises, enthralling around 10% of the GDP across developed countries. The blockchain and healthcare sectors are working parallelly to revolutionize sectors like medicines, vaccines, drugs, and clinical tests; however, it requires a complete overhaul.
The conventional methods of saving, storing, and sharing data are slow and vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The lack of accessibility to medical records for both patients and healthcare institutions is a barrier in the industry. Using blockchain development services for healthcare in full deployment, the patients will be at the center of all operations, improving uniform architectures and standards.
According to Statista, it is projected that 55% of healthcare applications will adopt blockchain for commercial deployment by 2025. According to another report, the blockchain in the healthcare market was valued at US$2.12 billion in 2020, and it is expected to cross US$3.49 billion with a CAGR of 8.7% by 2026.
What the Future Holds?
The future of Blockchain technology will help address all the issues of the traditional healthcare systems and empower healthcare businesses to boost the competitive landscape. With a secure cryptographic database combined with the medical records, storage will prevent misdiagnosis and the proper medical assistance while preventing patient confidentiality and security. Let’s see in detail what the blockchain future looks like
Seamless healthcare system
Healthcare organizations possess several fragmented patient health records, which is a significant issue. This issue can be entirely mitigated with the help of blockchain technology by adding it to medical record transactions.
With smart contracts, an intelligent health ecosystem can be created, enabling patients to access electronic health records. All the diagnostic processes, such as prescriptions, scans, test reports, medical bills, and other crucial data, can be reported as transactions.
Concerned personnel can monitor and access healthcare data and provide second opinions. The blockchain-based healthcare ecosystem will allow developers to build smart blockchain applications in healthcare that can analyze patient data and provide nutrition or fitness routines.
Electronic health record
The traditional healthcare system is often affected by attacks due to its centralized nature. Also, it is challenging for most repositories to interact with each other in the existing ecosystem.
Blockchain implementation will help healthcare providers and other stakeholders interact in real-time and improve performance, transparency, tracking, accountability, and reduce costs. It gives a new architecture that empowers healthcare providers to keep PHI private as the technology offers no centralized authority.
Efficient supply chains
The diverse benefits of Blockchain in healthcare can boost efficiency in supply chain management. It can be safely monitored and can reduce delays and human errors. It enables organizations to track products, prices, labor, and waste pollution at any stage of the supply chain. Product authenticity verification becomes highly easy and can be backtracked to its origin.
Companies like Block Pharma and Modum are working towards building efficient blockchain logistic solutions to prevent falsified drugs in the market. The movement of shipments can quickly be recorded on the blockchain in real-time, along with other crucial details like environmental conditions, vehicle information, reliable personal information, etc.
Secured healthcare payments
The healthcare industry often experiences a distrust factor when it comes to the payment segment. A massive amount of money is wasted due to alleged mistakes and disputes due to uncomplicated agreements between the parties. With blockchain, every party has access to the same information, building a chain of trust between them.
Due to its decentralized nature and shared ledger functionality, it allows transactions and asset tracking to record any value and monitor and analyze asset’s state in close to real-time. For example, for a patient, if the given services can be covered by insurance, multiple stakeholders are involved; however, with blockchain, a single ledger shared among various parties contains patients’ entitlement and smart contracts with encoded pre-authorized conditions.
Medical staff identification
Healthcare professional identification is made easy with blockchain as its authentication technologies and control limits build a safe repository that all members in the chain can use. Each contributor will have limited access or full access to the entire ledger.
Also, blockchain implementation in healthcare allows decentralized identification management empowering users to manage their identities independently from their eHealth providers. The IdM of healthcare organizations enables patients and caregivers to authenticate and validate each other’s trust and reliability.
Enhanced privacy and security
Privacy issues have always been of utmost concern in the healthcare industry. Some common issues related to it are listed below:
- Various hacking attacks
- Data integrity and accessibility
- Confidentiality of (PII)personal identifiable information and (PHI) protected health information
- Compliance with HIPAA regulations
Each blockchain network participant has one pair of public and private keys that acts as a visible identifier to address these issues. The key is cryptographically linked, i.e., enhanced security, making it impossible to crack each user’s private key in the care network. Also, blockchain offers frictionless connectivity due to its API-oriented nature.
Concluding thoughts
Other technologies, including IoT and Artificial intelligence with blockchain technology in the healthcare industry, will improve the safety and quality of care in health institutions. Blockchain in healthcare will bring transparency to the processes while reducing risks and lowering costs associated with the medical industry.
Also, healthcare will become more accessible and secure in the future. With technological advancements, blockchain development services are escalating the processes of healthcare institutions, and more businesses will adopt the technology at a higher rate in the coming years.
Richard Parker is an active content writer, reviewer and lifelong student of data analytics. He is enthusiastic about the real world application of analytics to improve business operations.
