Monday 9 July 2018

How can Blockchain Technology offer healthcare solutions?

Blockchain technology has great potential to support different businesses and sectors. Its decentralized and hack-proof feature makes it a most advanced technology so far. It is found if used appropriately blockchain technology can eradicate some of the important issues of the world. Well, with that positivity we are here trying to evaluate how blockchain technology development can offer healthcare solution.



This article offers a basic idea about the areas where the healthcare sector can use blockchain technology.


The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecasted that the healthcare spending will increase globally to $8.7 Trillion by 2020, but the same growth is missing in terms of better patient care outcomes.

Undoubtedly, the blockchain market is increasing in this situation it must be used for the overall betterment of the healthcare sector.

Initially, the technology was used for only three things:

  1. Identifying and tracking different drugs.
  2. Auditing doctors, healthcare provider, and hospitals which form a provider network.
  3. Network providers get paid based on patient health outcomes.

Now, blockchain technology can support Electronic Health Record.

Electronic Health Record or EHR is a digital database which records the total healthcare of patients. The healthcare documents are often found spread across different doctors and healthcare service providers which a patient has to meet in the journey of his treatment. It is difficult to collate and keep track of these documents manually, in that case, EHR works great.

There is a huge potential to combine large sets of health records with public databases using blockchain technology for better processing. In healthcare, EHR is viewed as a transaction over blockchain technology, as it registers ever patient visit, analysis, recommended treatment and other essential information. EHR also prevents the misuse of drugs, reduce fraud, and improves clinical trials and data security.

The top 4 applications of the technology in healthcare:

  • Data Management: By enabling health IT systems with blockchain technology, the medical data gain security and reliability assurance. The patients gain complete control of their medical records and the patient care community can have local copies.
  • Billing and claims management: Filing and processing of medical claims related to patient diagnoses, treatments and medicines can be made easy with blockchain technology development.
  • Medical research: The medical data stored over the public database can be easily distributed to medical researchers and doctors worldwide. It increases the change of medical collaboration and new research and development.
  • Data security: Blockchain technology is hack-proof and to record any data over a blockchain it needs the consensus of all the participants involved, thus it can make alteration or duplicity impossible.
It is unfair to conclude about blockchain technology use case over the healthcare sector. The area is vast and the future is bright too. Blockchain technology coupled with Artificial Intelligence also open up great opportunities for the healthcare departments. Few governments have already started to work on it. Well, our recent blog, Next Generation Healthcare Solutions based on Blockchain Technology & AI will offer you some more insight into what’s happening around the world. For more details feel free to contact us.


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