Rising demands for healthcare and medical services, draw attention to the need for an information technology system that can get rid of the dependency on a middleman. Blockchain Technology can aid to overcome these challenges as it is a system built on a distributed architecture. This technology does not require multi-level authentication and in addition deliver on-demand accessibility to sequentially arranged data. It is a robust technology that can improve the performance of healthcare industry as well as the quality of care and decrease total delivery cost.

This statistic showcases the estimated distribution of healthcare blockchain adoption across healthcare apps on a global sphere, in 2017, 2020, and 2025. It is projected that 55% of healthcare apps will have adopted blockchain for commercial deployment by 2025.

Healthcare companies had started to see the potentiality of growing blockchain technology. It is also anticipating a broad set of feasible apps which is targeting a large group of stakeholders such as Biotech firms, Medical technology companies, Pharmaceutical Distributors, Hospitals, Doctors, Clinics, Patients, as well as Care Service Providers.

By empowering new ecosystem and new business models, the blockchain will change the way healthcare industry functions. So let’s see how this emerging technology is transforming health businesses and increase caring quality.

Data Fragmentation

Gathering and safely distributing patients’ information is a challenge for the healthcare industry worldwide. Medical data generally flows from numerous directions, with records kept a mixture of electronic as well as paper files scanned to a computer.

The blockchain technology will seamlessly help in patients’ data sharing such as record and prescription as it stores data on a decentralized network. It keeps data across the complete network and nodes. So this kind of stored records can be used to provide complete longitudinal health records for individuals, giving all patients more control over their own information.

Transparency in Bill Management

Even in this digital era, 5 to 10 percent of healthcare costs are fraud, resulting from billing unperformed services. In the U.S. only, Medicare fraud caused around $30 million loss in 2016. The U.S. charges 412, Including Doctors, in $1.3 Billion Health Fraud.

When it comes to blockchain technology, it is now manageable to deliver realistic solutions to decrease these sort of frauds. When automation applied to bill processing activities, the blockchain technology could aid to expel the need for a middleman and diminish the administrative costs.

Tracing of Drugs

Reported by the HRFO (Health Research Funding Organization), nearly 10-30 percent of drugs in developing countries are fraudulent. Businesses of US loses up to $200 billion yearly because of drug duplication; it was not useful to patients and might be harmful as well as unsafe to their health.

The blockchain technology is having a feature of immutable transactions, so it would be great to detect fake drug dealers. Once a drug is generated and shifts from a manufacturer to a retailer, the operational data is taped on the blockchain. It makes it quite easy to identify the complete path of drug and determine all chain links any time.

Security of Data

Clinical trials are very sensitive information because by depending on that researchers receive and record information containing statistics, testing outcomes, quality reports etc. Each single scientist is liable for particular research. Law-breakers and attackers are curious to modify the results and make it beneficial for them.

The blockchain based solutions enable users to show the legitimacy of any document enrolled in the system. This technology stores immutable data which enables the recording of results from clinical trials in a safe way, making it infeasible to alter data.

PHI Management

Patient data privacy is truly regulated by the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and needs PHI to be safe entirely. Sometimes patients require to open-up about their medical records with third parties like pharmacies to purchase particular medicines. The blockchain will assist to secure the data while delivering partial accessibility.

Blockchain generates a hash for every PHI block, along with a patient identity. Utilizing an API, registered entities can obtain essential information without announcing any patient’s ID. A patient can fix particular third parties that will need to permit to share the PHI (Patient Health Information).

Master Patient Indices

While dealing with healthcare data, generally records found mismatched/duplicated. Also, various EHRs (Electronic Health Records) have several schemas for each field- containing different ways of entering and handling the simplest of data sets.

With the blockchain, whole data set is hashed to a distributor ledger, not just a primary key. The user will find the address- there can be more than one addresses and keys, but they will all opt out to single patient identification.

“As Precision Medicine is tied to cross-functional collaboration of global proportion throughout the translational processes, roundtrip, blockchain is a game-changer. Yet User Experience (UX) design remains a formidable obstacle to maturing blockchain from a pure technology play in the medical informatics research lab to consumers in healthcare and life science markets.”

– Dr. Ron Ribitzky, MD.

Some most auspicious app areas of blockchain for the healthcare industry

• Interoperability of Health Data – Offer all-inclusive security infrastructure for smoother health data exchange without dealing with third party.

• Healthcare Business Models – Change the digital health economy to generate new business and monetization models for health data or health asset exchange.

• Cybersecurity – Distributed network consent with cryptography techniques offers an extra layer of trust to decrease Cybersecurity threats for healthcare software and systems.

• Care Based on Value – Trustworthy workflows offer essential new potentialities for outcome-based care delivery as well as compensation models.

• Healthcare Campaign – Guarantee co-creation of faith and self-dominance for patient-centric blockchain health system.

• Accurate Medicine Practice – Enable patients to grant accessibility to their anonymous personal health information for researching commons and lucrative models.

Extracting the best benefits for Healthcare Vertical

• Healthcare data exchange and interoperability enhance care coordination with safe access to long heath records. Store generic and user-generated data with high security. It also offers smooth and safe management of patient’s identity.

• Claims judgment and billing management, help to decrease fraud and admin cost by automatizing billing and insurance activities as well as enhance applier and beneficiary KYC. Patients will get better information on projected costs.

• Drug supply chain integrity and remote auditing decrease drug duplication and theft as well as enhance pharmaceutical supply chain finance. It also provides better visibility for marketing activities and patient programs.

• Clinical trials and population health, research commons and compensable models as well as manage IP/R&D assets transactions. It offers faster regulatory compliance and approvals.

• Cybersecurity and IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) offers unique identifiers for medical devices and assets as well as secured and selective access to patient-generated health data.

Summing up

The blockchain technology offers a more secure way to safeguard data than average encryption. The new technology enables implementation of fresh standards to manage insurance claims, Patient Health Information (PHI) as well as medical records. It removes intermediation in data sharing and generates unique opportunities to reduce complications, enable trust-less cooperation and create immutable information.