Blockchain has emerged as a strong technology in the 21st-century tech world.  Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have helped blockchain technology to rise and come into the spotlight. It has brought trust, transparency, speed, and clarity to digital transactions empowering different sectors like finance, security, supply chain, and banking. In this article, we will share the blockchain technology impacts the Healthcare sector as well. It will help to understand and explore how blockchain can be utilized to create a strong healthcare system. Blockchain can be used to validate medicine along with protecting the patient’s data.

Blockchain and the Healthcare sector

Just like other sectors, healthcare is also going through a transformation. It focuses on developing a safe and secure environment and patient health records.

Blockchain is a pool of opportunities, it maximizes safety and convenience, the technology is highly useful in different areas of the healthcare system, such as for storing and sharing sensitive medical records and remote monitoring systems, insurance information both in healthcare venues and in the mobile apps, and for clinical trials.

Like every sector the healthcare sector also faces challenges. The major four challenges are as follows:

• Advanced Health Technology

Records on paper are a time taking task wasting time and money. With digitization, the patient’s record is just one click away. Blockchain has introduced Electronic Health Records, which show patients’ data in one place accessible to authorized users instantly. The challenge is how the employees have to shift to the digital version as part of their work.

• Health Data Accuracy

Data accuracy and security are other challenges that the healthcare sector is facing. Sensitive data has no data structure resulting in data breaching. It is evident that due to data variation region-wise, accuracy is not easy to maintain. Blockchain is trying to revolutionize by a distributed ledger that records transactions.

• Health Data Interoperability

There are a lot of financial discrepancies between medical agencies and insurance companies. This results in disorganized hospital records and excess funds. Due to its organized and secure structure, blockchain is reliable.

• Tracing Drugs

It is difficult to trace drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. It not also affects economically but also puts the patients’ lives in danger. The developing countries face fake drugs which harm the economy. The blockchain will track the drug eliminating fake drug production and distribution.

Blockchain Opportunities in Healthcare Sector

There are a lot of opportunities for the blockchain to operate in the healthcare sector. Some of them are as follows:

• Electronic Health Records (EHR)

It is a digital transformation of paper records, containing the medical history of the patient. Blockchain can make decentralized models for EHR. A single pool for the patient can be created by the blockchain making it cost-efficient.  Currently, the challenge is keeping the patient’s data intact while sharing it with the stakeholders.

• Remote Patient Monitoring

The blockchain can help in collecting, sharing, and reclaiming remotely collected biomedical data.  In return, the patients will have better access to high-quality healthcare to the patients and improved support.

• Drug Supply Chain Tracking

The blockchain provides a ledger that stores transactions chronologically in the form of blocks. It is important that the drugs are traced to eliminate the fake drug industry. The pharmaceutical industry can take advantage in terms of the supply chain.

• Direct Service Payment

As Blockchain technologies work on “smart contracts”, small, auto-run programs stored on the distributed ledger that automatically do payments when particular requirements are met. Due to fast-track payments using encrypted ledgers, the blockchain can help with the smooth international payment process.

• Patient Data Management

Blockchain can help organize and encrypt patients’ confidential data and their demographic information.

Blockchain impacts the healthcare sector

 There are many benefits of using blockchain in the healthcare sector. For example, blockchain can collect patient data from different organizations in one place saving time.

• Strong information security

The help health organizations, blockchain will secure the information through public-key encryption methods and decentralization.

• Cost-efficient payment processes

Blockchain will lessen the expenditure in cross-border payment processing. The process can be automated by using smart contracts saving time and money.

• Centralized administration

Due to decentralized administration, there are chances of data breaches and hacking.  It reduces dependency and bridges the gap between payers and providers.

• Preventing medical fraud and duplicity

It provides an easy interface to detect duplicate medical prescriptions showing transactions to the stakeholders.

It is safe to say that blockchain is going to be the next PayPal of the healthcare industry.