Before dipping into the blockchain technology healthcare use cases, it’s necessary to know what blockchain is for.
Blockchain is a robust technology for allowing secured data sharing and access amongst many parties. Thus, this is a significant challenge in digital health, where the privacy and safety of medical data are essential. Nevertheless, enhancing the quality cannot happen without better coordination of patient data administration. In short, blockchain can support digital health by driving it more accessible to convey data securely.
Blockchain Technology Healthcare Use Cases
What is a Blockchain for?
One of the biggest challenges is determining the real blockchain applications and the hype. Thus, this is tough as there are only rare large-scale, real-world blockchain undertakings past Bitcoin.
Blockchain’s most powerful proposition is that it withdraws the demand for a centrally controlled power. And it instead spreads energy across all players within the blockchain ecosystem. So, it can terminate the need for a third party to handle transactions between two commodities that don’t know or trust each other.
Benefits of Blockchain in Healthcare
Single, longitudinal patient records
Longitudinal patient records, gathering episodes, disease registries, etc., can be achievable via blockchain. Thus, it also includes inpatient, and wearable data, helping providers with helpful ways of providing care.
Master patient indices
When haggling with blockchain for healthcare data, logs get mismatched or repeated. Furthermore, diverse EHRs contain a distinct schema for every field. Also, it comes up with various ways of entering and exploiting the most accessible data sets. The complete data set is hashed to a ledger and not only the primary key with blockchain.
Claims adjudication
Blockchain operates on validation-based dealings. So, the claims can get confirmed where the network decides how a contract gets achieved. Likewise, there would be more infrequent errors or frauds since there is no central rule.
Supply chain management
Blockchain-based contracts help healthcare institutions in monitoring supply-demand processes via their entire lifecycle. How is the transaction abiding, whether the agreement is thriving, or if there are any delays.
Interoperability
Interoperability can get acknowledged by using refined APIs to make EHR interoperability. And also, data storage is a dedicated process. Thus, securely sharing blockchain networks would eradicate the cost and responsibility.
Supply chain transparency
A significant challenge in the healthcare industry is providing the origin of medical goods. It uses a blockchain-based system to chase items from the manufacturing end. Also, the supply chain enables buyers to have complete visibility and clarity of the goods they are purchasing at each stage.
It is a must for medical gadgets, which are growing fast with the adoption of more remote health monitoring. Therefore, it also attracts the interest of evil players.
MediLedger is a supreme instance of a blockchain protocol. Thus, it allows firms across the prescription drug supply chain to affirm the authenticity of pills, expiry dates, etc.
Key advantages of the blockchain paired with AI:
- Customer confidence: The customer can track each package’s end-to-end origin with integration with manufacturers, wholesale, shipping, etc.
- Compliance: Medical appliance manufacturers meet high reporting burdens to assure patient safety. Hence, aggregating supply chain data into one method helps streamline compliance. For instance, FarmaTrust delivers automated law enforcement reports when there is a problem.
- Supply chain optimization: Once all the details are in one place, organizations use AI to predict the market better.
Patient-centric electronic health records
Healthcare techniques in every nation and province are toiling with the issue of data siloes. It means that patients and their healthcare providers have a preliminary idea of medical histories. In 2016, Johns Hopkins University published a study indicating that the third leading reason of death in the US was medical blunders.
One possible answer to this issue is developing a blockchain-based system for medical records. Therefore, it should be related to existing electronic medical history software. It is critical to highlight the actual patient data. For instance, a physician’s note or a lab result is decoded into a unique hash function. A small series of letters and numbers. Every hash function is fantastic. It can only get interpreted if the individual who owns the data gives their consent. The medical chain is a foremost model of a company working with healthcare to enforce blockchain-enabled EMRs.
The key advantages of blockchain-enabled EMRs are:
- Complete source of truth of a patient’s records can form a better understanding for patients and healthcare providers.
- They allow patients to see if their medical records are updated. And also, give explicit consent when these get shared with healthcare providers. Patients can also convey their medical records to researchers. Also, they can set time limitations on how long anyone can access their medical data.
- Medical insurers can get quick, validated assurance of healthcare services from patients. Thus, this is also without an intermediary’s time and cost.
- FarmaTrust has designed a key to support gene, and cell therapy cures alongside its supply chain solution. Many studies are also probing how to integrate AI and blockchain to move forward personalized medicine.
Smart contracts for insurance and supply chain settlements
Companies such as Chronicled and Curisium deliver blockchain-based systems. Here various actors in the healthcare sector can authenticate their uniqueness. For instance, as associations, log contract details, etc.
Therefore, this environment can allow trading associates and insurance providers. Also, it enables to work on totally digital and automated contract terms.
According to Chronicled, over one million chargeback claims are made amongst these players every year. Also, more than 5% of them are in dispute and demands long manual solutions.
Likewise, sharing intelligent contracts can handle medical insurance contracts for patients. In contrast, Curisium says that 10% of claims are in dispute. Therefore, insurance providers can use more sophisticated analytics to optimize health outcomes. And it can cost once this data is digitally and readily available.
Medical staff credential verification
Blockchain technology can track medical professionals’ understanding. Thus, authorized medical organizations can log the credentials of their staff. Also, these, in turn, enable them to facilitate the hiring approach for healthcare institutions.
The essential advantages of the blockchain system are:
- Quicker credentialing for healthcare institutions during the hiring process
- A chance for medical organizations to monetize their credentials data on history and existing staff
- Clarity and relief for associates. e.g., organizations can appear in virtual health delivery models to tell patients on medical staff experience
IoT security for remote monitoring
One of the most considerable movements in digital health is embracing remote monitoring. All sorts of sensors help provide healthcare practitioners visibility into patients’ health. Therefore, it allows better proactive and preventive care.
Nonetheless, security is a massive issue in health IoT. It assures that patient data is confidential, secure, and not fiddled with to create false information. However, in some cases, where a connected device may depend on in emergencies, it is also vital that the support systems are very resilient to DDoS.
How blockchain systems could enable secure remote monitoring IoT devices:
- Blockchain cryptography assures that only authorized parties can acquire access to personal data. Thus, it gets stored on the blockchain as a particular hash function.
- Once patient data gets registered on the blockchain log, it is almost impossible to fiddle.
- The decentralized qualities of blockchain mean that IoT devices can interact straight with each other. That too, without moving through a centralized server. Thus, making it very difficult to establish DDoS and man-in-the-middle invasions.
Conclusion
Implementation of blockchain in healthcare case study or use cases are abundant and can alter the entire sector. The only problem is getting healthcare providers to embrace blockchain systems on a broader scale. Thus, once mass adoption ensues, it will facilitate the progress of the entire healthcare system.