Since its start, blockchain technology has gotten a lot of attention, mostly because of its unique qualities, such as being unchangeable and clear. Because of these features, it is a great solution to many problems in many industries, including supply chains, finance, banking, insurance, social media, energy, and healthcare.
With the rise of technology in the healthcare industry, every hospital and clinic is looking for ways to use technology to make their work easier. But because this sector also deals with very sensitive patient information, providers need to make sure that whatever technology they use doesn’t compromise the security of their patient data. This is where the technology of blockchain comes in. There are many ways that a blockchain development company and its services can help the healthcare industry.
In this article, we’ll talk about the following ways that blockchain can be used in healthcare:
Here are the most promising ways that Blockchains can be used in the Healthcare Field.
Electronic Health Records (EHR)
Blockchain can help you solve problems with data security, integrity, and management if you need to build an EHR system. Blockchain-driven applications let patients and medical institutions safely control health data, manage access to it, and protect its privacy. This is because they are not centralised and use cryptography.
Secure Data Sharing
Both patients and healthcare providers need the flow of medical information to work well. Patients can share PHI collected by smart fitness devices or medical records from other places with their doctors to make communication quick and easy. Also, medical data is valuable to researchers because they can use it to make reports, statistics, studies, and to improve treatment methods and medicines that are already in use. When we use blockchains for these kinds of things, we can protect the flow of data and come up with solutions that can’t be changed.
Medicine Authentication
The pharmaceutical industry can use the fact that the blockchain can create an unchangeable history of transactions. Blockchain-based pharma solutions can check where medicines come from and spot fake ones.
Supply Chain Management
As mentioned above, being able to track medical drugs can also help with supply chain management. Interoperability between blockchain networks can make it possible for pharmaceutical companies to track the movement of their products from where they are made to where they are sold. Some projects already use blockchains, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) to plan how drugs are made and predict how much demand there will be for them.
Clinical Trials
There are many people involved in these kinds of studies: the people who are being studied, the people who pay for the studies, the people who make the drugs or medical devices, the doctors, the researchers, etc. For a medical trial to go well, it needs to be private and for people to share data quickly and safely. When used in clinical trial systems, blockchains’ consensus mechanisms and decentralised structure lower the risk of data fraud. For example, a Proof of Existence mechanism can be used to protect trial documentation.
Patient Consent Management
Getting consent from patients and keeping track of that consent is hard to do the way it is done now. Healthcare organizations need to ask patients for permission to share data and for informed consent. They also need to protect data and patient privacy and follow different rules.
Solutions for advanced consent management that are based on blockchain let patients control who can see their data and share their consent without letting them change or delete certain medical information. These solutions update information in real time and get rid of problems with data that is inconsistent, unclear, or broken up.
Credentialing of Doctors
Credentialing is a process that every hospital and clinic has to make sure that all doctors are qualified to work with patients. It can take weeks to provide and verify all the necessary paperwork, such as diplomas from medical school, medical licenses, and letters from hospitals where the person has worked before.
But blockchains are great for verifying credentials and can speed up this process by a lot. A distributed ledger can safely store every piece of paperwork that a doctor gives and every step that a hospital’s credentialing office takes to check the information. Also, the history of transactions in a blockchain can’t be changed, so fake documents can’t be made.
Secure Payments
People make mistakes, payments are late, or fraud is done with a stolen patient’s identity, which leads to a lot of payment-related claims. The security features of the blockchain could make transactions in the healthcare industry better by reducing the number of denied claims, making it easy to report underpayments, cutting down on human mistakes, and better protecting patients’ identities.
Healthcare Setups
Most healthcare providers use one central database that is managed by one person or group within the organization. So, there is a single point of failure, which means hackers have more chances of getting to PHI than they do with decentralised systems.
The blockchain promises to stop these kinds of attacks by giving different people different levels of access to a ledger on the blockchain. Information in a blockchain is spread out and protected by advanced encryption methods like asymmetric cryptography and cryptographic hash algorithms.
Healthcare Coverage
When used in insurance applications, the blockchain can make it easier to manage patient data and lower the costs of regulation and compliance. It can also make it easier for doctors, insurance companies, and patients to talk to each other and make payments. Also, the fact that blockchain technology makes data clear can help solve the problem of having multiple middlemen throughout the lifecycle of a health insurance policy.
Future of Blockchain Development In Healthcare Industry
Some of the biggest problems in the healthcare industry can be solved with the help of a reliable blockchain consulting firm. So, its reach will only grow. With the rise of technical tools that make it easier to share patient information and improve healthcare procedures, the industry is looking for safe and open ways to do business so that the systems are completely real and the patients are sure of that.
Blockchain technology is already being used in the industry because it is decentralised and can provide strong and safe solutions. As time goes on, there will be more applications. It could also be used with other technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve medical care and healthcare blockchain solutions.
Final Thoughts
Modern technologies like blockchain, IoT, and AI offer benefits that healthcare providers can’t ignore. There are already a lot of blockchain-based medical solutions in the works, and they are always getting better. These tools can give healthcare organizations new options and help patients manage their records in a safe and easy way.
Medical institutions should think about using blockchain-based solutions right now if they want to be successful in the future. The best way to do this is to choose a blockchain development company that focuses on security and makes custom blockchain solutions based on your needs.
