Healthcare industry uses digital methods for maintaining electronic health records.
From the patient’s personal information to diagnostic reports, and doctor’s prescriptions, healthcare organizations, currently use the centralized database for saving data.
Blockchain will have a considerable impact on a patient’s record sharing, billing, and medical research.
Read further to understand how a blockchain healthcare solution can be built to improve the management of the patient’s health record.
Though healthcare centers are adopting digital technologies, the patient’s medical records are currently stored in the centralized servers. It creates the attack surface for hackers. Accenture’s survey claims one in five employees working in the healthcare is willing to sell the sensitive medical data to the unauthorized parties.
Electronic health records(EHR) contain exploitable information like name, address, place where you work, prescribed medicines, number of doctor visits and payment methods. A Medical record also contains sensitive protected health information like HIV diagnoses, cancer diagnoses, or psychological conditions.
Saving data on blockchain doesn’t mean no-compliance. In fact, blockchain will make compliance enforcement more seamless and transparent. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) Compliance ensures the protection of patient’ data. Healthcare vendor that deals with patient’s protected health information should follow HIPAA’s security measures.
HIPAA’s privacy rule allows all the involved members to access and disclose only de-identified data. It is essential that the compliance check is maintained before the health records get saved on the blockchain.
Blockchain can eliminate the risks associated with centralization of data by storing the digital health records across multiple nodes within the network. Even more on Healthcare blockchain, Transactions are completed and identified uniquely: Transactions containing patient’s health records are saved on the blockchain with their unique IDs and patient’s public key. If a healthcare provider wants to access a patient’s public non-identifiable data, the transaction ID is matched, and the information is displayed.
Let’s understand how different healthcare providers could consume data using smart contracts:
a. When the data is saved on the blockchain, smart contracts are triggered.
b. Healthcare provider receives the patient’s report with a hash that hides the identity.
c. Whenever a diagnostic lab or any other healthcare provider would request to access the patient’s health records, smart contracts notify the patients.
Smart contracts will ensure a transparent, conflict-free exchange of the information. In case, the user denies to exchange the information; no one could access the patient’s health records.
Blockchain healthcare solution could also enable healthcare research companies to use health records for research purposes without affecting the patient’s privacy. Read further to understand how
Data Mining and AI in Healthcare Blockchain
For example, if a research company wants to get the analytics for HIV disease, smart contracts would enable them to access details like HIV type, most-affected city or country, age group, and gender while hiding the personal information of patients.
Here’s what benefits could Blockchain bring to the Healthcare Industry
System Interoperability:
The inability to exchange healthcare records could lead to delays in treatment. But blockchain could alleviate this problem by decentralizing the data. Everyone within the healthcare network could access a transparent, yet immutable ledger while having the ownership of data.