Introduction

The sudden outbreak and rapid but uncontrolled worldwide second wave of Coronavirus clearly shows us the breakdown of existing healthcare surveillance systems to timely handle public health crises.

Though improvements in healthcare monitoring have been seen, these still fall short in stopping the Covid-19 pandemic. Lack of significant steps taken to ensure containment and tracking of the virus have exacerbated the situation.

Blockchain technology is frequently considered as a tool to assist with various features of containing the outbreak. Could the use of blockchain in the healthcare industry help to prevent the Covid-19 outbreak?

There are various challenges associated with Covid-19 such as:

• One foremost issue is how prepared Healthcare sectors are to respond to this outbreak.
• Keeping the data of infectious patients to stop epidemics.
• The urgency for developing better diagnostics, vaccines, and targeted treatments.
• No sufficient measures to adopt in a breakdown.
• Inaccurate information and false theories spread through social media platforms.

Implementing Blockchain solutions can treat Coronavirus. Many companies have recognized the potential of Blockchain technology and started to build solutions to track donations, drug supply chains, medical data, and identifying symptoms of Covid-19.

Blockchain technology offers security, transparency, and decentralization to track disease, monitor patients, treatment histories, equipment requirements, supply chain, etc more accurately and efficiently.

Most importantly, Blockchain will enable medical authorities to easily keep track of virus activity, patients, suspected new cases, and contain it in real-time.

At present, data and medical information of patients are spread across different departments and systems and therefore, can not be accessed when needed. But if the data is stored in Blockchain, it is secure and can be accessed anytime from anywhere in the world.

There are millions of dollars being donated in the healthcare sector for the public but donors know nothing about the whereabouts of those donations. With Blockchain technology, donors can track their donations until they have been received by the victims. Transparency is the key component of Blockchain which notifies the general public how their donations have been used and its progress.

Blockchain tracks all the information and data, particularly for infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID-19 and it can manage the crisis. Blockchain could instantly alert the public about the Coronavirus and also provide recommendations to contain it. Blockchain provides the healthcare sector with such a platform where all the concerned people can update each other about the situation and prevent it from worsening further.

Blockchain is also beneficial in tracking drug supply chains. The tamper-proof blockchain-based platforms can be used to review and record supplies, and logistics of epidemic prevention materials.

Being a leading Blockchain development company, RevInfotech has developed an application for ICMR (health ministry). With the help of this application, ICMR collects, stores and shares the clinical test results through the BlockChain solution. The tested patients are categorized based on color code under different categories like never tested, tested, tested & negative, tested & positive, tested positive & quarantined and tested positive & recovered. This application is also connected with other third-party platforms like Arogya Setu.

To conclude, Blockchain can not prevent the emergence of new viruses but it can instantly alert the public about disease outbreaks. Therefore, enabling Blockchain technology in times of pandemic can help prevent the disease by providing the early detection of epidemics, tracing medical supply chains, and managing the crisis of outbreaks and treatment.