Digital transformation in healthcare has had a positive impact on technology in healthcare. Wearable fitness technology, telemedicine, and artificial intelligence-enabled medical devices are all concrete examples of digital transformation in healthcare. These are all supposed to revolutionize the healthcare industry by improving patient care, streamlining operations, and reducing costs but instead, the industry faces significant challenges in terms of cybersecurity and privacy of patient data, billing, payment processing, medical supply chain, and drug integrity.
Blockchain technology can absolve the healthcare industry from facing these challenges, as you can establish a blockchain of medical records.
Blockchain is considered to be highly secure, transparent and immune to hackers due to its digital encryption; it also plays a prominent role in lowering intermediate fees as it is entirely decentralized.
Now, let’s see the 6 key applications of Blockchain in healthcare!
1. Healthcare Data Exchange and Interoperability
The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) has developed a definition of interoperability. As per HIMSS, interoperability has three levels.
For the real machine to machine interoperability of EHR systems the system must fulfill all the above requirements. In addition, data privacy is a big concern among healthcare stakeholders; hence any system that supports the interoperability of EHR must support permissions, trust and data security.
Blockchain provides a mechanism to anonymize data and ensures this data cannot be tampered with or forged. Blockchain uses public-key cryptography to create records that are time-stamped and immutable. Copies of these data records are then stored across thousands of nodes on a digital network. Changing these records at each node becomes an impossible task and prohibitively expensive, making the records reliable. The trust network created in this manner is among the most attractive features of the technology.
2. Drug supply chain management
Effective supply chain management is the biggest challenge in all industries. However, there is both additional risk and complexity in healthcare, as a compromised supply chain can affect patient safety. The increasing adoption of technology and globalization in a multi-stakeholder industry has resulted in a complicated healthcare supply chain.
The pharmaceutical supply chain is prominent in the damaged areas of the health supply chain. An IQVIA
Institute Study says that the worldwide pharmaceutical market will exceed USD 1.5 trillion by 2023. The OECD has found counterfeit goods that account for 3.3 percent of the global pharmaceutical drug trade.
Experts have estimated that the sale of counterfeit drugs is twice the legal pharmaceutical trade rate, which means it is a severe issue.
With its transparent, immutable and auditable nature, the pharma blockchain holds the potential to enhance the supply chains:
3. Prescription Drug Abuse
Drug abuse is a global epidemic, and real people are suffering. The UN estimates that there are 29.5 million people worldwide with drug use disorders.
What makes this scarier is that much of the drug problem is not in seedy alleys, crack houses or even Hollywood mansions. Part of solving this problem will be ensuring that the right medicine only reaches the people who need it. The healthcare industry has turned to technology to help address the problem.
The healthcare industry is using Blockchain to solve this problem and projects like MediLedger and BlockMedx are leveraging blockchain technology to bring security and transparency to pharmaceutical supply chains.
Blockchain startup BlockMedx has been working on an end-to-end prescription platform using the Ethereum blockchain. This platform uses an intelligent system that uses cryptographic tokens to facilitate transactions. Prescriptions transmitted via the platform can then be verified along with physician and patient data.
Doctors will be able to explore their own prescription history and even revoke prescriptions if they think something is wrong. Pharmacies could also make sure that they are filling legitimate prescriptions.
4. Health Insurance
According to
Deloitte, health and life insurers are among the many players who are scrambling to determine how Blockchain could be adapted to improve the way that they maintain records, execute transactions, and interact with stakeholders. Key questions center on whether Blockchain’s unique attributes could help insurers to cut costs, manage risk, improve customer service, grow their business, and, ultimately, bolster the bottom line.
Deloitte’s
Center for Health Solutions and
Center for Financial Services have recently partnered on a crowdsourcing research project to examine how health and life insurers might leverage Blockchain and related technologies in order to strengthen key elements of an insurer’s value proposition. The crowd’s mission was to brainstorm how insurers could apply this emerging technology in the next five to 10 years to improve current standard operating procedures and systems while also enhancing the customer experience.
They found six use cases that are the most realistic and promising for health and life insurers:
5. Clinical Trials
The risky and unpredictable nature of the clinical trial process has been a significant driver of high costs for pharmaceutical drugs. To justify drug development costs, most pharmaceutical companies aim to develop 2-3 new medicines per year, but the success rate and prolonged development timelines with clinical trials are diminishing the chances of a successful product to nearly zero.
This huge uncertainty translates into higher prices for everyone, from the investigator to the end consumer. Fortunately, Blockchain is attracting significant attention in the research community.
Blockchain technology utilizes a distributed computer network platform that enables databases to store time-stamped transaction records and documents. Blockchain is a safe and secure platform for storing and processing all types of valuable information, from clinical trial analysis results to business workflow documents to patients’ medical data and blueprints of genetic information.
The uptake of this technology could save the healthcare industry up to $100 billion per year by 2025 in data breach-related costs, including IT costs, operations costs, support function and personnel costs, counterfeit related frauds and insurance frauds. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the technology will be pharmaceutical companies, which lose approximately $200 billion to counterfeit drugs each year. By enabling complete visibility and transparency throughout the drug supply chain, Blockchain will enable the tracking of drugs to their point of origin and thus help to eliminate falsified medication.
However, a shift to blockchain-based solutions will require significant investments and efforts, including seamless integration with the current infrastructure, and blockchain providers may experience resistance from healthcare players for changing from legacy systems and processes to Blockchain. Industry alignment is necessary for bringing in standardization and promoting interoperability between different networks developed by various enterprises that run on different consensus protocols.
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