With its origins in the technology behind Bitcoin, blockchain has now become a game-changer in various industries, transforming cybersecurity strategies, mitigating data breach risks, and safeguarding patient information in healthcare. As healthcare organizations strive to navigate a complex landscape and improve patient outcomes, they face increasing security threats.
To ensure the protection of patients and their sensitive data, more and more organizations are turning to blockchain for its robust data-safeguarding capabilities:
- Robust data safeguarding
- Data integrity and immutability
- Controlled data access
- Transparent auditing trails
In this blog, we will explain how blockchain works and how to overcome implementation challenges to leverage its benefits.
Blockchain Explained
Blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger that maintains and securely distributes transactions among multiple interconnected computers (“nodes”) on a peer-to-peer network. Each set of transactions (“block”) is cryptographically linked to the previous block, creating a chain where the validity of each block depends on the validity of the block before it. The nodes must unanimously agree upon and validate each new block added to the chain, thus making the transactional history of the data virtually immutable.
Benefits of Blockchain in Healthcare
The medical sector has become increasingly dependent on blockchain in recent years, cementing it as an irreplaceable instrument for tracking pharmaceuticals, improving payment options, securing patient data and decentralizing health history records.
Enhanced Data Security
Traditional healthcare systems rely on centralized databases, making them susceptible to data breaches and cyberattacks. In contrast, blockchain operates on a decentralized network, storing data across multiple nodes. This decentralized approach makes it difficult for hackers to breach the system, as they would need to compromise numerous nodes simultaneously.
Auditing and Compliance
Blockchain's transparency and audibility are valuable for implementing regulatory compliance in healthcare. Each transaction on the blockchain is timestamped and verified, creating an unchangeable audit trail. This simplifies compliance with healthcare regulations like HIPAA by offering verifiable evidence of data handling practices to ensure accountability and transparency.
Consent Management
Smart contracts are computer programs that model and facilitate the execution of a contract between parties, typically for the exchange of some value, without the need for any human or third-party intervention. They significantly improve efficiency and can be created on the blockchain to specify the terms and conditions of the agreement and obligations of the patient. Once blockchain evaluates the contract terms and determines the contract requirements are met, the technology automatically executes and fulfills the contract terms.
Patient Record Keeping
Blockchain-based healthcare data systems have emerged as a transformative solution for digital healthcare record keeping. By leveraging this technology, doctors can obtain all available medical history details through a comprehensive, single source. This comprehensive view of a patient's medical history empowers healthcare professionals to make accurate diagnoses and informed care recommendations, ensuring optimal treatment outcomes.
Additionally, patients can securely send health information, keep medical records and complete administrative tasks via an app to a blockchain network. Electronic health record (EHR) systems use blockchain to not only enhance data security and privacy but also promote seamless information exchange between healthcare providers and patients, fostering collaboration, reducing redundancies and minimizing errors in healthcare delivery, ultimately leading to improved healthcare outcomes.
Prescription Processing
Prescription management processes can become more secure, efficient and transparent when leveraged by blockchain. Its technology provides a tamper-resistant and immutable ledger when a prescription is issued, ensuring integrity and preventing unauthorized modifications and fraudulent prescriptions. Additionally, blockchain reduces the risk of doctor shopping (where patients seek multiple prescriptions for the same medication) by verifying prescribers and identifying if a patient has already received the same prescription from another pharmacy or prescriber.
Common Challenges
While this technology continues to improve recordkeeping and database security, universal adoption of these solutions will require collaboration between healthcare providers, technology experts and regulatory bodies to ensure effective and standardized implementation.
Scalability
Healthcare systems generate a vast amount of data and transactions. As the number of participants and transactions increase, the blockchain network may experience delays, increased transaction costs, reduced system performance and greater processing times. Scaling solutions and improvements in network performance are needed to effectively handle an influx of healthcare recordkeeping demands.
Regulatory Framework
Patient databases must comply with regulations based on the jurisdiction where the information is stored or accessed. Blockchain, a distributed technology, makes it difficult to determine complete jurisdictional adherence, creating complexities regarding data governance, cross-border data transfers and compliance with regional requirements.
Standards and Interoperability
The lack of standardized protocols and frameworks for implementing blockchain in healthcare can pose challenges. Regulatory bodies may need to develop guidelines and standards to ensure interoperability, data exchange and compatibility between different blockchain platforms and existing healthcare systems.
Conclusion
Blockchain’s ability to keep an incorruptible, decentralized and transparent log of patient data makes it an ideal method to preserve and exchange sensitive information through hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, pharmacy firms and physicians.
While challenges and regulatory considerations remain, we can expect to see a paradigm shift in healthcare operations, patient-centric care and innovative solutions that improve outcomes for individuals and communities worldwide as the technology continues to mature. With blockchain at its core, the future of healthcare holds great promise for a more secure, efficient and patient-focused ecosystem.
To learn more about other emerging technologies in the industry and how to leverage data to accelerate transformation, download the eBook from our partner, Snowflake, on 7 Data Trends Transforming Healthcare and Life Sciences.
