Healthcare and Blockchain
Implications of blockchain technology on the healthcare industry.
Last year- clinics sought out ways to incorporate telemedicine into their daily practice. Companies like Teladoc were gaining in popularity, their stock soaring to new all-time highs. As healthcare is slow to change with technology, the development of telemedicine is a step forward. Overall, providers and patients were satisfied with using telemedicine as a platform for their practice, saving them and their patients time while not compromising care. And many patients say they’d do a televisit again. Who doesn’t want to see the doctor in the comfort of their own home, especially when ill?
While this is positive, healthcare is one of the last trillion-dollar industries to be influenced by tech, leaving much more room for improvement. Let's begin:
Blockchain Technology
A blockchain is a growing list of records using cryptography (coming from the Greek word- “κρυπτος” meaning hidden & “γραφεια” meaning work/writing). It is a non-modifiable transaction communicated via nodes. And it’s all on a peer to peer network with a consensus algorithm to ensure the transaction is completed. Take EBay for example, I list a pair of shoes for sale through the help of a third party (EBay), they connect me with a buyer and EBay verifies the transaction and takes a small profit. Now imagine this without the third party. Remove Ebay from the picture and insert blockchain. This is a decentralized system, meaning it is not owned by anyone and the algorithm is set in stone. No one can modify the transaction and it’s verified by the network itself on an extremely secure platform.
The applications of the blockchain network on medicine are endless.
Electronic Medical Records (EMR)
The first place where I see blockchain being incredibly useful is for health data management. Remember the days when you went to the doctor and your folder was pulled from a shelf of thousands of medical records? You left with a golden piece of paper- a handwritten prescription for some sort of medication. Fast-forward to EMRs. EMRs are a digital format of medical data- created to better store patient information and to ease the transmission of information through network-connected, enterprise-wide information systems or other information networks and exchanges. This system is far from perfect. First, the networks own the data and patients have a very difficult time accessing it. If you’ve ever had to call medical records, you'd know this much! Secondly, privacy is a huge concern. How protected is your medical information on these electronic databases? Breaches of information occur all the time- Anthem in 2018 exposed the medical data of nearly 80 million people! Thirdly, one of the reasons EMR systems were supposed to be so valuable for medical providers was the ease of transmission of medical data. Where this could be a huge vantage point, the EMR system has not mastered this. It is still very difficult to obtain collateral on patients- so when a patient shows up to the Emergency Room, lots of phone calls and googling are still occurring to better understand the patient’s medical history.
- Patients should own their own medical data.
- Patients should be able to easily access their own data.
- Providers should be able to easily access patient health history, with the ease of transmission of information through network-connected, enterprise-wide information systems or other information networks and exchanges.
The answer to these problems is the blockchain network.
While healthcare is hard to influence and even harder to change, I believe it is worth the conversation. There are many advantages with blockchain infiltrating the healthcare sector- improved universal access, interoperability and data integrity just to name a few. This is just the beginning. The best is yet to come.
Would love to hear your thoughts/ideas. Thanks for reading!
Follow me on twitter! Stefanie Karangelen , @stefkarangelen.