What Are The Impacts Of Blockchain Technology In Healthcare Industry?

The late 20th century and the early 21st century have seen many innovations and discoveries in the healthcare industry that has changed the lives of people on Earth

One of the most significant healthcare industry trends in today's time is blockchain technology. Some even call it the new or “next internet”.

The digital healthcare industry solutions are largely driven by the faster on-demand medical data access and better patient care to give a more accurate treatment and analysis of any healthcare industry problem

The innovative pace of healthcare software company in USA begins with artificial intelligence and now is accelerating with the new blockchain technology applications.

The blockchain is a new word in the world of technologies that gained immense popularity by the price of Bitcoin ethereum and other cryptocurrencies

Today blockchain technology helps healthcare industry in exchanging vital healthcare research & data by enabling it among doctors pharmacists medicine stakeholders and other healthcare providers to have a fast, secure, scalable, flexible, reliable, and simplified access to the electronic medical data

Therefore, capitalizing healthcare and blockchain together becomes a great idea for a businessman to improve the work efficiency

What Is Meant By Blockchain?

A blockchain is a decentralized distributed and public digital ledger that records transactions across many computers retroactively so that there remains no chance to alter data

Blockchain comprises of two words blocks in which transaction data is recorded and chain which is formed bye buy data blocks in an orderly fashion

Basically, blockchain is made of three major Technologies Private key cryptography, P2P network, and blockchain protocol program

You can find many blockchain websites who use these three Technologies to make a well-secured online application

Also Read: 7 Major benefits of BlockChain Technology in Healthcare Industry

Why Blockchain Is Very Important?

Blockchains are used in almost every industry and business sector. Whether you take Information Technology, Education, Healthcare, Retail, Digital marketing, and lots more make use of the blockchain to a greater extent. Investment in the black chain has been very profitable.

Blockchain is a revolutionary invention as it solves many digital challenges like:

• Transparency: Blockchain offers a great deal of transparency as every transaction made is recorded and verified publicly.
• Immutability: All the data written in the blockchain cannot be altered by anyone once it’s entered.
• This also includes the system administrator and third parties. This helps people to prove that their data is genuine and unaltered.
• Security: In Blockchain the data is stored across all the systems instead of a centralized database which enhances its security and makes it hack-proof.
• Reduced transaction costs: Blockchain completely eliminates third-parties and even banks by allowing peer-to-peer transactions thus reducing the transaction costs.
• Innovation: Blockchain provides a great platform for new & innovative business models to grow and compete with conventional businesses.

Blockchain is not only used in the healthcare industry but it is also used in education digital marketing retail and e-commerce business banking and finance sector and many more industries.

The Healthcare industry sector has already invested dollar 177 million but now it is expected to grow to $ 250 million by 2023 

It helps the healthcare industry in a number of ways such as increased privacy, security, increased efficiency, developing integration, and lots more.

Benefits Of Blockchain Technology In Healthcare

In a blockchain system, there is no central authority; instead, transaction records are stored and distributed across all network participants.

Interactions with the blockchain become known to all participants and require verification by the network before information is added, enabling trustless collaboration between network participants while recording an immutable audit trail of all interactions.

Blockchain technology creates unique opportunities to reduce complexity, enable trustless collaboration, and create secure and immutable information. Following are some of its benefits:

Decentralized system

As discussed earlier, the Blockchain has a decentralized system which makes it hackproof and prevents every single copy of data from getting compromised.

All the commodity hardware in the hospital can be made to run on these decentralized systems. This is will eliminate all the man-made and even natural disasters in-turn providing foolproof security.

Moreover, the power saved by these systems can be used by the researchers to make convoluted calculations to find cures, drugs, and treatments of various diseases and disorders.

Single data source

We studied earlier that in blockchain all the transactions are stored and added to the chain only after getting confirmed by the majority of participants.

Moreover, the data recorded can’t be changed which proves 100% of authenticity and security. The researchers can use this property to study a massive amount of undisclosed information of a specific group of people.

This assists longitudinal studies that are used for the development of precision medicine for effective treatment.

Also Read: 7 Innovative Ways Blockchain Can Boost Start-Up Culture

24*7 monitoring & access to data

Blockchain for healthcare can be used for storing and updating useful patient data like blood pressure and sugar level in real-time with the help of IoT and wearables.

This assists the doctors to monitor patients 24*7 which are prone to high risk and to inform & alert their caretakers & relatives in case of an emergency.

Single patient identification

In the healthcare industry, the duplication and mismatch of the patient’s records can be done frequently. Hence to avoid that to a greater extent, single patient identification is possible.

With the blockchain, the data manipulation is impossible as it has different layers of multiple addresses and keys to look for the address of single patient information.

Consistent rules through the smart contract

A smart contract is nothing but a computer protocol that digitally verifies, facilitates, and enforces the negotiation.

In healthcare, it helps in the development of a consistent rule-based process for various organizations to access patient’s data.

Blockchain healthcare apps are usually based on this principle. Recently, Peerbits developed a doctor-patient mobile application by integrating the blockchain technology. You can view the working principle of that app in the below video.

Budget-friendly

Blockchain technology is one of the most cost-effective solutions. This removes all the hurdles of extra mediators and third parties. The absence of data fetching via mediators and third parties makes it very cost-effective.

Also Read: How Blockchain Technology Gaining Trust In Enterprise?

Storage capacity

If you make the use of blockchain in the healthcare industry, then this will consist of all the patient records, data, medical records, documents, lab reports, X-rays, images and lots more. Each member has its own copy, and that is another benefit.

Conclusion

The use of blockchain for healthcare data exchange will contribute the largest market share throughout the forecast period, reaching a value of $1.89 billion by 2025, owing to the use of blockchain to solve the most widespread problem in healthcare information systems related to interoperability and non-standardization that has created data silos in the industry.

Blockchain is relatively a new technology that is in its nascent stage. Its huge success in the form of Bitcoin has certainly raised the bar of expectations.

In the coming years, we may see Blockchain disrupting the healthcare industry and with that, there will be a boost in the healthcare app development using the blockchain technology.

However, it’s also true that the implementation of blockchain in healthcare might not be a cakewalk as it might face some serious challenges as discussed in the article.

At last one thing is for sure that Blockchain will make the healthcare sector swift and secure than ever.

According to the report and the way the blockchain is being adopted by various sectors, it definitely looks like the future of the healthcare industry is indeed decentralized. 

Let’s hope that the blockchain technology provides the horizontal innovation boost to this industry that it desperately needs.