Incorporating Blockchain in Healthcare for a Better Tomorrow

Blockchain offers a tremendous opportunity to overcome today’s healthcare challenges, including interoperability, safety, integrity, traceability, and universal access. Blockchain addresses the challenge of synchronizing patient data between multiple disparate HIS while ensuring the security and privacy of patient data by adopting a distributed patient identity management framework.

By increasing the efficiency, disintermediation, and security of electronic medical records, blockchain technology could provide a new model for the Health Information Exchange (HIE). It helps combine smart contracts, reduce the need for insurance and telehealth, such as using Skype to arrange for a doctor’s appointment instead of physically going to the hospital, and open up new health care opportunities.

The telemedicine process begins when a patient opens a case and sends relevant information to his or her doctor via an app. The dermatologist returns a diagnosis and treatment option after reviewing the sent information. When it's time to pay, patients can use tokens like MEDX or ERC20, similar to bitcoin. The payment is secured via the ethereum blockchain that supports smart contracts.

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CoinHealth could be the first medical cryptocurrency to earn coins with smart wearables, with the idea that a healthy lifestyle should be rewarded. CoinHealth is not only about being a currency but also about providing blockchain functions.

It can be a difficult process to share patient data between doctor’s offices, especially if a patient needs to see multiple specialists or involves multiple private practices. A decentralized system that focuses on the patient instead of the data holder uses the blockchain to create a shared database of patient data.

According to an IDC report, Forbes Global 2000 companies will use blockchain as a digital trust foundation by 2021 at least 25 percent. While blockchain has begun to create waves in the wealth management industry, the unexplored domain is how the industry transforms its way of working. However, less than five percent of CIOs and only 12 percent of managers in the paying industry have blockchain in their business plans.

The technology is also used for file transfer in clinical trials to create and maintain patient data and pharmaceutical history storage of the blockchain network with patients, doctors, and payers using smart contracts to further determine the Certificate of Medical Necessity (CMN), thus avoiding intermediation. Blockchain technology helps not only health institutions but also pharmaceutical companies in which the use of this technology leads to a faster and more efficient problem-solving.