Role of Blockchain Technology in the Healthcare Sector?

Introduction

With all the talk about “blockchain technology” in the healthcare sector and the general market, it’s nearly difficult to turn a blank eye. Often people don’t see the scope of blockchain in the health care sector. The article will clarify the role of blockchain in the healthcare sector, but before that let us understand what blockchain is.

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that allows many parties to securely share and access data. This is a fundamental difficulty in digital health, where the privacy and security of medical data are crucial while enhancing the quality of care requires increased coordination in patient data management throughout the healthcare system and the capacity to apply analytics to population-level medical data.

In brief, blockchain can benefit digital health by making it simpler to securely communicate data across widely fragmented healthcare systems with a patient agreement. Let us see the 5 blockchain healthcare use cases in digital health. 

5 blockchain healthcare use cases in digital health:

ss to more reliable and widely available population-level data would allow for considerably more sophisticated segmentation and analysis of targeted treatment results.

3. Insurance and supply chain settlements using smart contracts

Companies such as Chronicled and Curisium provide blockchain-based systems through which various players in the healthcare industry, such as pharmaceutical companies, medical device OEMs, wholesalers, insurance companies, and healthcare providers, can authenticate their organizational identities, log contract details, and track transaction of goods and services, as well as payment settlement details for those transactions. This environment goes beyond supply chain management to allow trading partners and insurance providers in the healthcare sector to work on entirely digital and, in some circumstances, automated contract conditions.

They can significantly reduce disputes over payment chargeback claims for prescription medicines and other goods by having shared digital contracts between manufacturers, distributors, and healthcare organizations logged on a blockchain ledger, rather than each player having their own version of contracts. According to Chronicled, because price structures vary often, over one million chargeback claims are lodged amongst these players each year, with more than 5% of them being challenged and necessitating long human adjudication.

Similarly, shared smart contracts may be used to manage medical insurance contracts for patients, where 10% of claims are challenged, according to Curisium. Insurance providers, as in other use cases, may utilize more advanced analytics to optimize health outcomes and costs if this data is digitized and freely available.

4. Verification of medical personnel credentials

Similar to monitoring the authenticity of a medical product, blockchain technology can be used to track the understanding of medical professionals, where trusted health organizations and healthcare institutions can log the credentials of their staff, in turn helping to streamline the hiring process for healthcare organizations. ProCredEx, located in the United States, has created a medical credential verification system based on the R3 Corda blockchain technology.

The following are the key advantages of the blockchain system:

• Credentialing for healthcare organizations throughout the employment process should be completed more quickly.
• A chance for medical institutions, insurers, and healthcare providers to monetize their existing credential data on previous and current employees.
• Transparency and reassurance for partners, such as organizations that subcontract new virtual health care models to tell patients about medical staff experience.

5. Remote monitoring of IoT security

One of the most significant developments in digital health is the usage of remote monitoring systems, in which various sensors tracking patients’ vital signs are utilized to provide healthcare practitioners with more insight into patients’ health, allowing for more proactive and preventative care. Many intriguing remote monitoring use cases have previously been discussed in our articles on 5G and edge computing in digital health.

However, security is a major concern in health IoT, both in terms of ensuring that patient data is private and safe and that it is not manipulated to provide misleading data. In some scenarios, when a connected device may be relied on in an emergency, such as informing an old person’s caregiver that they have had a fall or a heart attack, it is equally critical that the supporting systems are highly robust to DDoS or other service disruption attacks.

How blockchain technology may aid in the security of remote monitoring IoT devices:

Blockchain cryptography ensures that only authorized parties have access to personal data, which is stored on the blockchain as a unique hash function (any change in the source data generates a different hash function, and a user must have a specific set of cryptographic keys to decode the hash function into the source data).

Because blockchain is decentralized, IoT devices may interact directly with each other rather than going through a centralized server (like most IoT connections do today).
Disclaimer: This blog has opinionated information which does not make us liable for anything.