What Are The Benefits Of Blockchain Technology In The Healthcare Industry?

Blockchain technology is a breakthrough data management and exchange technology that has taken the globe by storm, particularly in the financial industry. Its enormous success in a variety of businesses has raised concerns in the healthcare industry as well.

People are calling it the “solution to interoperability” and “the technology that will solve healthcare’s looming challenges,” but if the uncertainty persists, it will take twice as long for blockchain technology to make a difference in healthcare.

Healthcare accounts for a significant portion of the gross domestic product (GDP) in developed countries. Hospital expenditures, on the other hand, continue to rise, as do wasteful procedures and health data breaches. This is one area where blockchain technology has the potential to improve things. It can accomplish a lot of things including providing secure encryption of patient data to dealing with epidemics.

The healthcare industry looks promising for blockchain since it provides a myriad of possibilities for the industry to grow and evolve. Read the blog by ChainTechSource, a leading blockchain development company, and understand the benefits of blockchain technology in the healthcare industry.

What is Blockchain?

The term “blockchain” refers to a shared immutable record of a sequence of transactions, each of which is made up of one block, and which is held together by cryptographic keys called hashes. These keys or signatures are maintained in shared ledgers and connected by a network of nodes or processes. Every node has a copy of the entire chain that is constantly synchronized and updated.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the advantages of blockchain development include its tamper-resistant nature, the decentralized nature of digital ledgers, and the impossibility of changing a published transaction later within the user community that shares the ledger.

Why Blockchain in Healthcare!

Critical information in healthcare is dispersed across various systems and may not be accessible when it is most required. The current healthcare infrastructure has been criticized for its inability to handle information sharing and has been suggested that it be improved.

According to the most current Gartner Hype Cycle, blockchain has gone past the “innovation trigger” and is only at the “height of inflated expectations,” and could potentially revolutionize how we perceive healthcare and data together.

The lack of a central administrator is one of the most significant factors that make the use of blockchain development in healthcare revolutionary. This is because a database is still a physical object made up of bits and bytes. If the database’s contents are stored in a system’s physical memory, anyone with access to that system has the ability to corrupt the data.

The Impact of Blockchain Technology in the Healthcare Industry

· Single and Longitudinal Patient Records:

Longitudinal patient records, including inpatient, ambulatory, and wearable data, can be created using blockchain. This allows physicians to come up with new, innovative, and comprehensive ways to provide care to the patients by aggregating their episodes, disease registries, lab results, and treatment records along with other vital information.

· Master Patient Directories:

When working with healthcare data, it’s common for records to be mismatched or duplicated. Furthermore, each EHR has a unique schema for each field, resulting in a variety of methods for entering and processing even the simplest of data sets. The complete data set, not just the primary key, is hashed to a ledger with blockchain development. The user would look for the address; numerous addresses and keys may exist, but they will all lead to single patient identity.

· Settlement of Claims:

The claims can be automatically confirmed where the network agrees on the manner a contract is implemented because blockchain works on a validation-based exchange. There would also be fewer errors or scams because there would be no central authority.

· Managing Supply Chain:

Healthcare businesses can use blockchain-based contracts to track the supply-demand chain throughout their full lifecycle, including how the transaction is going, whether the contract is successful, and if there are any delays. Hence, can employ an efficient supply chain management system.

· Interoperability:

The promise of blockchain technology, interoperability, may be realized through the deployment of sophisticated APIs to make EHR interoperability and data storage a secure procedure. The cost and difficulty of data reconciliation would be eliminated if the blockchain network was shared with approved providers in a secure and standardized manner.

Besides these, blockchain development has the potential to revolutionize revenue cycle management, drug supply management, clinical trials, and fraud prevention. The potential of blockchain in healthcare is largely dependent on how eager healthcare institutions are to build the necessary technical infrastructure.

The cost of blockchain development is high, there are questions about its integration with existing technology, and there is much speculation about its cultural acceptance. But one thing is certain: blockchain has taken the healthcare industry by storm in the last year, and there are big blockchain investments.

Your quest at finding a robust blockchain development company that can provide you with a competent solution in the healthcare industry ends here. ChainTechSource, a proficient blockchain development company will cater to all your blockchain-related requirements efficiently.