Blockchain in healthcare guide: The blockchain technology is one of the most important and disruptive technologies in the world. Multiple industries are adopting the blockchain technology to innovate the way they function. One of the industries that are looking to adopt the blockchain is the healthcare industry.



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Why Blockchain for Healthcare ?


The healthcare sector generates vast amounts of critical data that often remains scattered and unorganized across various systems. The lack of proper and adequate infrastructure further aggravates this issue as a result of which healthcare providers (HCPs) are unable to access vital information at the times of need. The absence of a centrally monitored and administered system makes the healthcare data susceptible to breach and corruption. If data is stored within a particular physical machine, then anyone who has access to it can tweak the data and misuse it or even corrupt it.


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Blockchain applications, however, do not need a centrally administered system since the data will be stored within blocks of a distributed ledger, safeguarded through intricate cryptography. In a blockchain-based system, it’s not possible to manipulate and corrupt the data since the tweaked hashes will not match what’s fed into the system.

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n the healthcare scenario, blockchain applications are not only helping preserve and safeguard data integrity but are also helping pharma companies in regulating the drug supply chain, recruiting patients for clinical trials, facilitating interoperability with IoT devices, and much more. Blockchain is decentralized, distributed, and immutable, and hence, it holds an immense potential to transform the healthcare sector by minimizing operational costs, eliminating corruption of data, optimizing healthcare processes, and promoting transparency.

How will blockchain technology be used in healthcare ?

Fewer than 5% CIOs and only 12% of the payer industry executives have blockchain figured out in their roadmaps. That’s why, keeping aside the hype, we need to understand the realistic applications of blockchain in healthcare.


Here are five ways blockchain can benefit healthcare:

ingle, longitudinal patient records: Longitudinal patient records- compiling episodes, disease registries, lab results, treatments- can be achieved through blockchain, including inpatient, ambulatory and wearable data- assisting providers in coming up with better ways of delivering care.

Master patient indices: Often when dealing with healthcare data, records get mismatched or duplicated. Also, different EHRs have a different schema for every single field- coming up with different ways of entering and manipulating the simplest of data sets. With blockchain, the entire data set is hashed to a ledger, and not just the primary key. The user would look for the address- there can be multiple addresses and multiple keys, but they will all yield to a single patient identification.

Claims adjudication: Since blockchain works on a validation-based exchange, the claims can be automatically verified where the network agrees upon the way a contract is executed. Also, since there is no central authority, there would be fewer errors or frauds.


Supply chain management: Blockchain-based contracts can assist healthcare organizations in monitoring supply-demand cycles through its entire lifecycle- how is the transaction taking place, whether the contract is successful, or if there are any delays.

nteroperability: Interoperability, the very promise of blockchain, can be realized by the use of sophisticated APIs to make EHR interoperability and data storage a reliable process. With blockchain network being shared with authorized providers in a secure and standardized way, that would eliminate the cost and burden associated with data reconciliation.