Can Blockchain Find its place in Healthcare Family?

Blockchain is the most buzzing tech word around the world in 2017 without any doubt. Unfortunately most people are mistaking it as bitcoin technology but it is way more than that. Several hundred applications are using block chain technology, Bitcoin is just one of them.

Let us understand what blockchain is

Blockchain is a distributed record of transactions or events that can be shared peer-to-peer with high data integrity. It makes way for most transparent transactions across the networks. Using this core blockchain system, there is scope to build powerful and secured applications for different industries.

The scope of Blockchain system in Healthcare

Healthcare is one of the emerging industries that is taking digital path. If you observe the recent years many areas of healthcare are completely digitalized. As healthcare industry has loads of data to handle, there is lot of scope for Blockchain.

Handling Patient’s Data

With the evolvement of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in Healthcare, Doctors are handling large piles of data for analysis. For Example, past medical conditions and reports of a patient are tracked and analyzed by new healthcare provider for better understanding of the patient condition. Many challenges are involved in this process like secured sharing of data, data format compatibility between the two providers etc. These problems can be tackled with the effective use of blockchain.

With the use of blockchain, Interoperability between different providers is achieved and data exchange is made simple.

Privacy to Patient’s Data

As blockchain has public/private encryption, patient will have a private key with him to secure his data and also can share only the “selected information” to healthcare providers. So patient has control over his data and can also track the log of data access. Doesn’t it great control to patients?

Transparent billing management for health payers

There is high chance for fake medical claims which could result in loss for health payers. This fraudulent claims are happening because of traditional administration and bill processing. When we introduce blockchain system in billing management and automate most of the things, payment process activities will be transparent so there will be less chance for fraud.

Finally one thing is clear, there are many possibilities in healthcare to implement blockchain but as it requires high amount of power to operate and has some physical barriers we may not see overnight growth of it, however in near future we can see it expanding in healthcare.