Many people might have heard a lot about the blockchain in terms of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ether, etc. People believe that the blockchain technology can only disrupt the finance sector which is not true.
Blockchain technology has the ability to bring transformation across various industries including banking, healthcare, insurance, identity, gaming, publication and so on.
When it comes to the health industry, blockchain ensures to bring transparency in medical processes by connecting different stakeholders on a single platform. Understanding the potential of the blockchain in healthcare can help different healthcare providers such as doctors, hospital administrators, lab technicians, and health insurance companies.
Currently, the patient’s reports, personal information, and doctor’s prescriptions are stored in a centralized database, which is exposed to a single point of failure.
Saving the data at one place and in a centralized way increases the chances of hacking or data theft. According to 2017 Ponemon Cost of Data Breach Study, the cost of data breaches for the medical organizations is found to be 380$ per record.
To overcome all these issues existing in the healthcare industry, implementing blockchain in healthcare can enhance the management of health records.
Here’s how Blockchain in healthcare could possibly work:
Blockchain-based healthcare solution could be divided into the following steps:
1. Data Generation
2. Data Enrichment
3. Storing health records on Healthcare blockchain
4. Data Consumption with Smart Contracts
5. Data mining and AI in Healthcare Blockchain
First of all, it is essential to gather the medical data generated from different sources.
The healthcare data can be of the following types:
Data generated from devices, which could be X-rays, Ultrasound reports, MRI scans, Endoscopy, Radiography and so on.
Doctor’s prescriptions.
As per IDC, medical data is expected to grow to 2314 exabytes by 2020-21. Therefore, it is essential to develop an innovative solution to manage healthcare records in an efficient way.
Saving the health records in the blockchain can keep them secure and managed. It can be possible to trace back the health records stored on a distributed ledger due to the traceability feature of a blockchain.
In a blockchain-based healthcare solution, the patient’s identity can be replaced by a hash.
When a patient’s identity is replaced with hash, it becomes impossible for an attacker to decode the protected health information and identity.
The health records can be stored on the blockchain by healthcare vendors with the patient’s public key, but can only be accessed or viewed with a patient’s private key. Therefore, the health records are considered to be more secure when stored on the blockchain.
By defining the business rules in the smart contracts, it can be ensured what data needs to be shared with whom.
Every time the data is saved on the blockchain, smart contracts trigger and records are shared with a hash to hide the patient’s identity.
By offering an immutable and secure ledger, bringing transparency and reducing complexities, blockchain opens up an excellent opportunity for the healthcare industry. A blockchain-based healthcare management solution will offer the ownership of data by allowing all members of the network to own the data and will enable them to share the data with members they want.
Look out for the blockchain development company to build a blockchain-based healthcare solution for the seamless experience of healthcare data exchange.