Health care is gradually transitioning from a one-fits-all service to be highly customized — precision health.
Using blockchain in healthcare, the care and intervention given to a patient are tailored to take into account their unique environment, lifestyle, medical history, and even genetics.
Indeed, healthcare data is at the center of precision health. Other major components of this model are automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Blockchain technology in healthcare offer solutions that enable the secure collection, analysis, and data sharing for healthcare organizations. Also, through smart contract applications, the technology makes it a lot easier and more secure to automate processes and systems.
Meanwhile, it makes it possible that the patient can be the owner of much of the data collected about them and have full control over it. In conventional medical systems, the service provider owns the data, which creates serious challenges in the delivery of holistic care.
There are five main use cases of blockchain technology in healthcare systems.
Every time a patient visits a health service provider, data is collected from them. This includes practitioner notes, medical images, laboratory results, prescriptions, and therapies. After immediate use, the clincial data is often stored in local or silo-ed databases.
Despite the growth in the use of electronic health record (EHR) systems, it is still challenging for healthcare providers to share data, especially if they are not in the same organization or even more so country.
In many cases, especially in third-world countries, there are no efficient channels through which one service provider can access health data collected by another.
And even where such a system exists, service providers might be reluctant to share medical records for various reasons, including the entitlement to the ownership of the data, concerns about losing clientele to competitors, and lack of necessary legal framework.
Also, countries might have different system and channel formats for sharing medical records. This becomes an issue, especially when a patient moves between two or more countries.
If the fragmented medical records in different silo-ed databases can be put together, trends in the patient's health can be discovered. Some of these trends might translate into early diagnosis and intervention for life-threatening conditions.
Blockchain technology for healthcare offers the capacity for medical data to be collected and stored such that the patient owns it and can move around with it to every service provider they visit.
Using a private key, the patient can give the service provider access to read what others have recorded and add more to the file. Smart contracts on the blockchain can limit access to the records in terms of time and scope.
With the medical records on the blockchain and under the patient's control, a service provider does not need to request the previous service providers to access, read or add more data.
Over time, the records from all the service providers can create a detailed map that can guide the precision health intervention the patient might need.
Besides making medical records more accessible and compiled into a single file that every service provider a patient sees can access, a blockchain network in healthcare offers security in various ways.
First, it makes recorded data immutable, which means it cannot be arbitrarily changed. It can only be edited as outlined in the smart contract that helps manage it.
Secondly, the data is not on a server that an attacker can easily hack and steal.
Thirdly, the data is protected through public-private key cryptography. The patient’s agents, such as an authorized family doctor and family members, might be offered the authority to give access through multisig protocols. This is helpful in situations where the patient might not be in a position to grant access to their medical records.
Medicine and other medical supplies are critical products. The slightest change in their quality can lead to adverse effects. Unfortunately, the world has continued to face the challenge of counterfeit drugs, especially due to insecure and opaque supply chains.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that between 9% and 41% of medicines sold in low- and middle-income countries are counterfeit.
Hospitals, doctors, and patients cannot tell whether the drugs they use are genuine. The supply chains are easily compromised and counterfeits are easily sneaked into the system.
The blockchain offers a shared, immutable digital ledger that stakeholders in the supply chain can use to track the movement of medical supplies from the manufacturers to the individual patient.
Insurance is a critical component of the delivery of healthcare services. Unfortunately, the industry has to accommodate fraud, which ultimately pushes healthcare costs up significantly.
According to some studies, fraud in the health insurance industry accounts for about 10% of the health care bill. Besides, processing insurance claims often take long to approve as there is a need to authenticate them, which can hamper service delivery.
Blockchain offers the capacity to deal with and overcome fraud in the industry. That capacity comes from immutability, cryptography, and decentralization aspects of the new technology.
Using smart contracts on the blockchain alongside other technologies such as AI and secure oracle networks, the insurance company can get real-time updates on the clients' health and any interventions provided. Using this information, the system can automatically settle any bills required without waiting for manual notification and filing.
In addition, the technology creates the right environment for precision health care, which includes unique personal circumstances being considered when calculating the premium the client needs to pay. This can save the insurance and the client money in the long term.
Staff credentials in the healthcare industry are many times the difference between life and death for the patient. Because of the level of attention to detail required, the training of medical practitioners is highly demanding.
As a result, they are among the highest-paid professionals. Unfortunately, this often incentivizes quacks to get into the system.
Research by the Association of Medical Consultants (AMC), an association of specialist doctors in India, has shown that the number of quacks in the rural areas of the country is more than twice that of qualified practitioners.
For this reason, it is important that the process of authenticating the qualifications of medical practitioners needs to be secure but also easy.
Just like patients can accumulate and carry along with their records on the blockchain, so can medical practitioners.
On the blockchain, credentials are secure not only from third parties but also from the practitioners themselves. One cannot arbitrarily change data as it becomes immutable once recorded. Also, verifying the institutions that issued a credential is easy as the record is on a shared public ledger available to the network participants.
Indeed, whatever record a practitioner generates on a patient's file can easily be linked to their profile and credentials.
Every medical breakthrough is made possible through rigorous research and test processes. The blockchain can help with this process in various ways.
The technology can make it easier to identify participants, given that patients can easily accumulate more data about their health in one place for a long period. It is easier to determine trends that provide more information and possible cures.
Meanwhile, the technology can protect patients from their data being used in research without permission. Indeed, blockchain creates a mechanism through smart contracts and native digital tokens through which patients can pseudonymously permit their data to be used for research and get compensated.
The blockchain benefits both service providers as well as the patient.
Through its immutability, decentralization, and cryptography, blockchain offers incredible data security to medical records more than centralized systems do.
The technology makes it possible that service providers can share the cost of managing a system. It also creates other mechanisms for incentivizing those who run the medical systems besides direct fees. Also, the technology has a layer of security that can be sufficient.
Blockchain facilitates seamless and low-cost automation of systems and processes using smart contracts. It also offers a global infrastructure, allowing patients to receive precision health care even when they are far away from home.
Even though it offers many benefits to the industry, blockchain in healthcare has a few obstacles to overcome before it is widely used.
It is still early days for blockchain adoption, especially in the healthcare industry. Meanwhile, it might take a lot more than the technology being available for it to be embraced.
In particular, it needs the goodwill of the incumbent electronic health record (EHR) service providers and the regulators to integrate it into the existing ecosystem. For example, many legal jurisdictions have very detailed laws on how medical data is collected, used, stored, and shared. Such laws might have to change for blockchain to be useful in a meaningful way.
While blockchain in healthcare has displayed great features that could be valuable to the industry, such as security, privacy, crossborder use, and giving patients control over their data, it still has challenges when processing significant amounts of transactions.
Meanwhile, the healthcare industry might require a huge capacity to find meaningful value in the technology.
With that being the case, adopting the blockchain in healthcare systems is past the consideration stage. It is already being actively implemented.
Accenture is one of the notable technology companies building blockchain solutions for the health industry. Meanwhile, CVS, the largest pharmacy in the United States, has also found blockchain use and has even filed for non-fungible token (NFT) trademarks.
In health insurance, Anthem is using the technology to improve its processes and systems.
Meanwhile, the list of startups using blockchain to build different solutions is growing. It includes Avaneer Health and PokitDok, which have both raised about $50 million in capital. The other notable startup is MedicalChain, which has raised about $25 million.
The team behind the Casper project understands the potential the technology has to change the healthcare industry, leading to better health outcomes for patients across the world
We have built a blockchain infrastructure with significant smart contract applications, which can help automate systems and processes (see also blockchain use cases and industries using blockchain technology).
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
