Blockchain has Transformative Potential for Improving Healthcare

With so many innovative technologies transforming the modern industrial sectors, Blockchain technology has taken the world by storm for its revolutionary data management potential. The technology has witnessed immense success across various industries and healthcare world is no exception to rattle for it. Today, the use of Blockchain technology in the healthcare industry is considered as the answer to interoperability, sufficing to solve looming problems in the healthcare continuum. As of now, the technology is in its nascent stage and it is expected to soon make its ingress into the healthcare, transforming the sector globally.

The Indian healthcare sector today is seeing a steady transition from manual paper-based data collection to electronic data, revolutionizing the ways healthcare providers handle their patients and their records. Though Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and healthcare IT solutions are used to successfully consolidate and organize patient information, the rapidly occurring changes and the widespread implementation of this method has resulted in unprecedented flaws, security risks, and vulnerabilities. Blockchain technology has been increasingly adopted by healthcare sector and other financial services sectors to significantly alleviate inadequacies within the sector.

So, what is Blockchain technology? Well, it is an innovative concept that allows managing the healthcare data seamlessly across the Big Data environment. Blockchain is simply an integrated, distributed, write-once-read-only digital records fed chronologically and shared in a large peer-to-peer network. It is an incorruptible electronic ledger of transactions or records that can be programmed to track not only financial data but virtually everything of value.

Though recording transactions in a distributed and shared database across authorized users sounds simple, what makes Blockchain different is that none of the authorized users can edit, delete, or move a record, unless otherwise validated by all users synonymously. The fact that Blockchain technology needs no central administrator to control data makes it more secure, scalable, and easily accessible. Moreover, Blockchain offers enhanced data privacy for sensitive patient information and critical healthcare data from being corrupted or become vulnerable to attackers. Blockchain technology can enable healthcare providers with efficient data sharing between disparate IT systems, allowing them to communicate effectively and provide the highest quality of healthcare services to patients.

Role of Blockchain in Healthcare

The emerging Blockchain technology has been gaining attention in healthcare for its efficacy in preventing the data tampering and any potential vulnerabilities. It serves as a distributed tamperproof database with clever cryptography that allows authorized users to digitally sign and timestamp transactions, thus providing irrefutable proof for provenance and existence of records at any given time. With the healthcare industry plagued by frauds and thefts of data, Blockchain provides the required breakthrough to streamline electronic data sharing securely and protect sensitive patient data from hackers and other vulnerabilities.

The Key Benefits of Blockchain in Healthcare

Blockchain technology holds the potential to substantially reduce tangible and intangible costs associated with dupery and onerous reimbursement processes in healthcare. Unlike the existing health IT solutions, a Blockchain-based system provides realistic solutions to minimize medical billing-related frauds. Given the number of fraudulent activities happening in healthcare administration over improper medical billing, claims adjudication, and payer reimbursements, it is a highly relevant use of Blockchain in the healthcare sector. This is because Blockchain technology can efficiently verify and authorize data fed into the system, virtually eliminating the need for multiple parties to countercheck entries back-and-forth, thus becoming a cost-effective and efficient solution that facilitates data security.

Interoperability is one of the major promises of Blockchain in the healthcare scenario. It offers the use of sophisticated APIs that makes data storage and EHR interoperability a reliable process. Since Blockchain network is shared with authorized providers in a standardized and secure way, it eliminates the cost and difficulty associated with data reconciliation.

The distributed architecture of Blockchain-based systems offers a true potential to build a patient-centered healthcare system where single, longitudinal patient records can be compiled with health episodes, disease registries, lab results, and treatments along with inpatient, ambulatory and wearable data, all of which assists healthcare providers to provide with better ways of delivering healthcare services to patients. Moreover, Blockchain technology minimizes or eliminates healthcare data records from getting mismatched or duplicated as the entire data set is fed into a ledger and not just as a primary key, thus all information yielding to a single patient identification.

Blockchain technology holds the transformative potential to overcome some of the major challenges in healthcare such as identity theft, privacy, data liquidity, data integrity, and interoperability limitations. In recent years, Blockchain technology is all set to make its headway into the healthcare industry, revolutionizing and advancing healthcare practices across the industry. Overall, the use of Blockchain technology in healthcare can improve healthcare efficiencies, support better patient outcomes, and create a favorable environment for a patient-centric healthcare system.

However, there is still a long road ahead for the healthcare industry to incorporate and implement the Blockchain technology universally into all aspects of the system. With proper integration of Blockchain technology with ML, IoT, and Big Data, it is possible to create a seamless, interoperable, and secure healthcare domain that brings actionable insights and enables higher quality patient care.