Blockchain Technology in the Health sector is Transforming Medical Care
Blockchain technology has the potential to transform telehealth and telemedicine services by providing remote healthcare services that are decentralized, tamper-proof, transparent, traceable, dependable, trustworthy, and secure. It enables health professionals to detect scams in healthcare educational qualifications and medical testing kits often used for home-based diagnosis. Blockchain technology is ubiquitous and can potentially disrupt various medical industries, but here are the five the potential to disrupt various industries in the medical field, but here are the five primary key areas where it can transform the health sector.
- Secure Access To Personal Health Records: An electronic health record (EHR) is a type of tech that allows you to keep track of your medical records. It maintains digital records for a number of healthcare institutions. However, the health sector requires immediate access to data, and there are concerns regarding the privacy and security of patient medical records. Medical records have to be accessed without breaching privacy and security when shared between hospitals or enterprises. As a result, blockchain-based solutions can help to solve this problem. The blockchain has the potential to outperform the traditional centralized system, which has a severe lack of accessibility. This is a decentralized ledger technology that was recently introduced to bring a new perspective on data security and system reliability.
- Patient Consent Management: The effectiveness of virtual care and health monitoring is dependent on the accuracy of electronic health records (EHRs), which contain a patient’s medical history, diagnosis, medication, and treatment plans. To keep a patient’s medical data up to date. EHRs are highly sensitive and confidential information that must be safely shared with peers like hospitals, pharmacies, and health regularity authorities. Traditional consent management systems suffer a number of issues, including long convergence times when sharing EHR with specialists, a lack of trust in third-party servers that provide patient consent management services, and the inability to perform impartial audit trials. Because there are no intermediaries, blockchain technology can help to ensure trust. Consent management is assured and protected by blockchain thanks to many peers from various participating organizations.
- Remote treatment traceability: For efficient remote patient health assessment, telehealth and telemedicine necessitate an electronic face-to-face meeting of patients and professionals. Telehealth service delivery is based on direct-to-consumer (D2C) and business-to-business (B2B) formats. Patients in the D2C model can electronically contact doctors to discuss their health concerns, whereas caregivers in the B2B model can remotely participate in consultation and medical education services (e.g., patient surgery) using audio and video conferencing tools. Health organizations are unable to manage the silos of patient health records in existing telemedicine systems due to limited data sharing among themselves. To address this issue, blockchain technology provides all stakeholders with a unified and consistent view of patients’ EHRs. Because of the availability and transparency of health records, participating organizations may trace a patient’s medical history and recommend appropriate therapy. For example, using blockchain technology, audits can be undertaken to determine who accessed electronic documents and what transactions were carried out.
- Trustworthy Health Insurance Services: By allowing access to a patient’s medical record, blockchain technology can help insurance providers reduce insurance fraud. Patients might be compensated for enabling insurance companies to use their medical records. In addition, several insurance firms reward premium payers with bitcoin tokens or cryptocurrencies for living a healthy lifestyle, such as recording gym visits. The smart devices attached to the patient can transact on the blockchain to create trust.
- Traceability Of Drug Delivery And Pharmacy Refills: To share drug prescriptions with the local pharmacy, the virtual online consultancy-based healthcare systems require the physician to transact on the blockchain. Blockchain technology, using hash functions, can help to prevent potential prescription errors and record tampering. Registered pharmacists can access the pharmaceutical prescriptions stored on the blockchain in order to verify, prepare, and deliver the medications to patients. In exchange, the shipper can register the shipment’s present location on the blockchain, allowing pharmacists and patients to track and trace it. Furthermore, the openness and traceability of blockchain transactions can allow patients and clinicians to validate the legality of the medicine by tracing its data provenance. When a predetermined criterion is met, a smart contract can automatically place a (periodic) prescription refill order for the medicine to the pharmacy. The pharmacy can then authenticate and validate the prescription in order to refill it. Following a successful prescription refill, the prescription is mailed to the patient, and records are updated accordingly.
The use of blockchain technology in telehealth and telemedicine is still in its early stages. Before blockchain technology can be widely used in medical domains, much research must be conducted as it is a much crucial sector. Every industry, including education, supply chain management, and real estate, is incorporating blockchain technology into its operations. Contact BSEtec, the finest blockchain technology development company, to research, develop, and deploy blockchain solutions to harness its power in a way that provides monetary benefits for your business.