Today, the amount of blockchain-based success stories is growing exponentially. With so many industries making practical use of this technology, healthcare might be the one to benefit the most.
IBM reports that 56% of the surveyed healthcare executives aim to implement blockchain tech by 2020. Why? Because blockchain can drive innovation to the healthcare sector and cover its most critical problems and challenges, including poor data management.
By enabling consistent communication across networks and providing transparent transaction tracking, blockchain is a key element for building value-driven healthcare. One of the major problems this technology can solve is the industry’s inefficiency and outdated approach to storing, sharing and protecting clinical data.
Here, we’ve outlined prime examples of how blockchain advantages can align with the healthcare needs.
Streamlining Supply Chain
As the basis of blockchain, distributed online ledgers can enhance the way healthcare supply chains work.
Built as an unalterable account, blockchain transactions can be linked into a validated chronological train, allowing companies to follow the journey of medical components and materials through every step of the supply chain. This model brings an immense value to pharma and medtech organizations, allowing them to track their records from the manufacturer to the consumer.
Since each data entry is logged and encrypted, there’s no chance to alter it. Thus, blockchain owners can identify breakdowns and issues and validate the lifecycle, boosting the supply chain efficiency if necessary.
Structuring Medical Records
When dealing with any medical system, patients have to cooperate with multiple divisions and third parties. Various touch points and scattered communication lead to chaotic patient records and fragmented disease histories. Blockchain tech allows structuring the whole information into a single unit.
Pulling together data from each medical division, blockchain creates a unified system of patient records, allowing inputting procedures, diagnoses and prescriptions when necessary. As a result, patients get a full visibility and centralized report on their well-being, which can be used both for their own use and for any medical system. The accessibility to this confidential information is also controlled by patients.
Accelerating R&D
Blockchain can streamline clinical trials and innovate research divisions of medtech companies. Since the technology allows collecting larger volumes of data and then structure them within a comprehensive architecture, companies get a chance to conduct a more complex analysis.
Blockchain helps companies to identify, coordinate and maintain clinical trials automatically, validating patients’ profiles and eligibility. With blockchain-based networks, researchers can gather clinical information times faster, safer and easier, as the technology offers a more reliable and consistent way of data collection and storage. Plus, patients can control the records and share public or private keys to provide additional access to the system.
This way, driving blockchain innovation, organizations can bring down their R&D expenses and boost data management.
Increasing Security
According to Protenus Breach Barometer, the first quarter of 2018 was marked with 110 healthcare data breaches that exposed 1.13M patient records. The numbers are impressive, but blockchain has even more impressive potential to overcome this challenge.
Blockchain-powered infrastructures allow organizations to keep their data safe and sound, protecting every transaction logged into ledgers. Each submitted data entry is immediately encrypted, digitally signed and stored, with no further possibility to alter it.
Moreover, by getting the control over data, patients can decide who has the permission to enter their records, thus eliminating the risk of their violation and theft.
How to Adopt Blockchain?
Blockchain may become a silver bullet for the healthcare industry, offering so many benefits for this sector. But how should organizations go about implementing it? Are there any painless methods?
Sure, there’s a variety of frameworks and platforms helping to incorporate blockchain’s efficiency into healthcare workflows. genEOS, for example, is one of such systems. Being powerful and easy-to-use at the same time, the platform helps companies to adopt blockchain faster and with no hassle. With systems like genEOS that enable effortless blockchain adoption, the healthcare industry gets a chance to grow and improve exponentially.