The digitalization of the healthcare industry is advancing at a rapid pace. But what role does blockchain technology play in this revolution? Undoubtedly, blockchain technology is a key factor in transforming the healthcare sector, thanks to its ability to provide security and reliability in information management. In this article, you will discover eight use cases of blockchain technology in the healthcare industry that can benefit both patients and healthcare professionals.
What is Blockchain?
Blockchain technology is a distributed database that allows secure and transparent storage of information. It is a chain of blocks in which each block contains verifiable information linked to previous and subsequent blocks.
Every transaction made on the blockchain network is verified and validated by multiple nodes in the network, making it immutable and resistant to manipulation. Additionally, data encryption guarantees privacy and information security.
This technology initially gained popularity as the foundation of Bitcoin, the most well-known cryptocurrency in the world, but its application has expanded to other sectors, including healthcare.
Secure Medical Records:
Blockchain enables secure and unalterable storage of information, facilitating efficient data exchange between professionals and ensuring patient privacy. For example, the Mayo Clinic organization uses blockchain to keep detailed records of its patients' medical histories.
Optimization of Medication Supply Chain:
By utilizing blockchain technology, it is possible to achieve complete traceability of medications in the supply chain, ensuring product safety and proper maintenance. As Andrés Garrido, founder of ChainGo, points out, blockchain can also help increase control and supervision of the process, avoiding breaks in the cold chain and maintaining the integrity of medications during transportation. In addition to these benefits, the use of blockchain can also be useful in developing home delivery processes for medications, increasing patients' accessibility to the treatments they need.
Medical Data Sharing for Disease Research and Drug Development:
Blockchain technology could provide solutions for the development of new treatments, disease study, and statistical medical research. SalusCoopApp is an application that demonstrates how the use of blockchain can enable patients to participate in research securely and anonymously while protecting their privacy.
Users can subscribe to different research campaigns and share their health data such as heart rate, weight, height, daily steps, traveled paths, or sleep hours. Additionally, they can respond to surveys to provide more relevant information to researchers.
Blockchain technology stores the collected information in an immutable record, ensuring the security and privacy of the data. Furthermore, it allows users to have control over how their data is used, empowering them to decide what information they want to share and for what purposes. This protection of privacy fosters collaboration between the medical community and patients.
Counterfeit Medications:
Using blockchain to record information about manufactured drugs guarantees the authenticity of medications, preventing counterfeit products from entering the market.
Furthermore, it enhances control and detection of counterfeits by immediately detecting any attempt to introduce a fake medication into the supply chain. This actively prevents fraudulent introduction of medications and achieves greater control and detection of counterfeits.
Protection of Privacy and Security of Medical Documentation:
Blockchain-based tools enhance the protection of medical documentation and ensure patient privacy. They simplify access and improve the certification of patient and professional identities. For instance, VIDwallet exemplifies this by implementing double-factor authentication and the Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) paradigm. It raises the security level of document access, empowering doctors and patients to actively own and manage their identities.
Automation of Health Insurance Procedures:
Health insurance providers have found great potential in blockchain to automate insurance management processes, as it is a decentralized network that guarantees the integrity of information. This increases transparency and reliability in transactions, preventing fraud and abuses for both the insurer and the insured.
Data Sharing
Blockchain enables different healthcare organizations and providers to securely and transparently share data. This can improve collaboration between different stakeholders and enhance the quality of healthcare.
For example, IBM is working on its Healthchain project to unify patients' medical information in Latin America, using IBM Cloud's blockchain technology. This will help improve patient care by promoting precision medicine and automating administrative processes while ensuring information security. Furthermore, the use of blockchain could enhance the efficiency of AI-powered diagnostic robots by gathering large volumes of validated information.
Exergaming
Blockchain is also impacting the Exergaming industry, which combines exercise and games. The collection of exercise data, such as the number of steps taken while running, is increasingly common through mobile applications and smart devices. However, these large companies often profit from the generated information without rewarding the users.
Fortunately, there are applications like Sweatcoin and Stepn that reward users for the exercise they perform, using the concept of Move to Earn. These applications incentivize physical activity and allow users to reap economic benefits. Stepn, for example, is a Web3 application that combines elements of SocialFi and GameFi and already has a large number of daily and monthly active users.
In conclusion, blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry. It offers innovative and effective solutions for improving people's quality of life and advancing healthcare. As more projects emerge and new applications are discovered, we can expect further advancements in the future. Blockchain is a key tool for elevating healthcare to a higher level.
