How will Blockchain possibly affect the U.S. healthcare system?

The idea of using blockchain in healthcare comes out of the need for security in healthcare. With the evolution of IoT(Internet of Things) and mobile healthcare Apps, everyone records and transfers a huge amount of medical data every day. We need to manage this data traffic safely.

Blockchain can provide a solution that helps to securely share medical records. It also assures the privacy of each by giving the patients their medical data ownership. Besides the advantages of blockchain for healthcare, there are also some challenges we want to point out.

The Benefits for People

Blockchain will change the healthcare industry for people. It can enable a unified and secure exchange of electronic health records.

Patients can own their medical records instead of storing their data somewhere else. Since the data is unified, any updates are done worldwide. So new data is available when it is needed.

Patients can also choose, with who they want to share their data. Thus, control can be oriented more towards the consumer.

So blockchain provides the ability to access health records when needed.

The Challenges for People

But with new technology, there are also some challenges for people. Once the provider has your data, they could process it steady without your agreement.

Also, people are not much aware of this new technology. So a lot of people could be confused. They don’t know where the data is stored and who can have access to this data.

The Benefits of Processes

Blockchain will change the healthcare industry for processes. So security is a critical issue for healthcare processes. The blockchain technology can provide high tamper resistance. So health data can be promised to be kept with high-level security.

Also, you can store your health data from different sources on the blockchain. So you don’t rely on one central party.

Blockchain has the potential for the automated validation of claims, qualified verification, and pre-authorization. So that may increase the transparency, efficiency, and security of the process.

As a result of the transparency, a new level of trust could be attained among patients and medical staff.

It also can increase the level of security by a lot.

Research is another example that blockchain can help with. Its decentralized approach to managing permissions, authorization and immutable audit trail. It also can provide rapid and secure access to important research data.

Blockchain may enhance the development of drugs and medical devices. It could also reduce the production of false medicine and clinical trials. It does this by decreasing the amount currently spent on confirmation by the third party.

More benefits for processes in the healthcare industry

Blockchain technology can also help developing new hardware and software to improve healthcare processes. It can tackle the problem of proper use and integration of new devices into the current network. This is important for sensitive health data.

Blockchain also offers to make healthcare processes easier and more robust. So data is stored in a single format and connections among various parties. Thus, it doesn’t matter at which place the health record was processed. As a result, maintaining and sharing data gets easy.

Also, we can reduce human error and processing times. The reason for that is because the system could minimize human involvement with data. And because every data is copied and stored on each node it makes them available to access to the users at all times.

The origin of the assets is traceable. Thus the verified data is more robust. This is essential for some healthcare processes such as insurance transactions.

The Challenges for Processes

Blockchain will change the healthcare industry and with it the processes, but it also has some disadvantages. There is still a huge uncertainty about this technology.

This causes issues about the legality of this technology.

In order to implement the changes to the current system, it must be legally approved first.

There are also several potential barriers to ethics. Also the approval with regulatory and the technical barriers related to data storage and distribution can be a problem.

How to use shared data is one of these challenges. For example, how a patient can choose which data to share and to whom. Patient, as the owner of the data, must authorize a health care provider to access the data. If for any reason the patient is not able to do that, it is unclear who can give him permission.

We also have to train the staff and the patients. They need to learn how to design and manage the distributed Apps. So you can ensure vertical and horizontal scalability.

Also, the transition may take a long time. During the transition, there may be some issues in the processes. For example, currently, for patients capability of self-reporting the symptoms of their sickness is app-specific. That means patients can only access this feature if their provider’s medical system implements it.

Benefits for New Technologies

Blockchain will change the healthcare industry and with it the technology. The blockchain network is flexible, adaptable, agile, and secure with high performance and low latency.

With the help of them, we can avoid time-consuming and resource intensive authentication and information processes. As a result, this makes healthcare procedures much quicker.

Also software is designed to ensure the transparency of medicine manufacturing process to track medical distribution, and ensure the authenticity of prescriptions.

Challenges for New Technologies

With all the advantages that blockchain can offer there are also some disadvantages. The cost and complexity can cause huge problems. Because of the high cost of data centers, everyone might migrate to third-party providers. As a result healthcare providers may have to pay to access the data.

The technical complexity of blockchain can be difficult to understand for everyone. Many patients might be confused to manage their medical records owing to the complexity of blockchain setup.

Another technical disadvantage is that it is not ideal for data with high temporal resolution and multi-dimensional data.

And since it is an open network that anyone can join, it needs massive computing power for effective tamper resistance.

We have to test the effectiveness and efficiency of handling large volumes of data. Once the traffic increases, the transaction time can get long depending on the protocol. This can have a huge impact of the scalability.

A global standard is also needed to store, access and share data in the cloud.

Also if the whole network is taken over by attackers, there is a 51% chance of security threat.

If you want to know more about how Blockchain can affect other industries, check this out: https://nirolution.com/blockchain-changes-industries/