3 ways Blockchain can revolutionize Healthcare
By: Petros Leandros
Tags: Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical

1. Patient Health Data Exchange

One of the problems that patients often face, is the required proximity to a hospital/doctor in order to receive medical advice and undergo effective treatment — for example, a patient will generally need to visit a specific hospital in order to get examined and curated by the hospital’s doctors, and even if the patient has a medical history with other hospitals, it will be very difficult for his data to be accessed. In large cities where there are a lot of hospitals and doctor offices with close proximity to each other this is not a major issue, however, this can get problematic for cases of patients living in the countryside, away from major hospital complexes.

Even though solutions to this issue have been attempted (for example, e-medicine solutions where doctors can communicate with patients from a distance with their data being shared, or hospitals sharing data with other medical centres to collectively decide what would be the best course of action to a patient’s treatment), issues related to data security and patient anonymity still exist. Blockchain has the potential to enable the development and enhance the scalability of such solutions, given its enhanced capabilities related to data security and anonymity.

2. Drug Supply Chain Enhancement

Another one of the problems that the Healthcare industry faces, is that it is often hard and expensive to maintain a large enough inventory of drugs and medications in a close enough proximity to be delivered in any given hospital/centre upon request. That is the case especially for rare disease incidents where drugs are very rarely (if ever) required to be available. Furthermore, existing supply chain infrastructures, do not offer enough accuracy and precision in providing information on the tracking and the exact arrival time of drugs and medications that are requested to be delivered.

As we have covered in some of my prior articles, Blockchain technology has the potential to offer major competitive advantages for applications related to supply chain management and inventory tracking. As such, it would be beneficial if healthcare organizations would benefit from Blockchain’s advantages to be better able to track and measure the storage, stocking and arrival time of drugs and medications that are requested to be delivered for patient treatment. Furthermore, Blockchain technology allows for the gathering, saving and utilization of data, such as the sourcing demand, storage times of the different stages in the supply chain pipeline, drug distribution mapping etc. Healthcare executives should seriously consider implementing Blockchain solutions to enhance drug supply chains, as it has the potential to offer considerable cost, time and efficiency improvements.

3. Fraud Prevention and Billing Management

Patients that visit doctor offices are often complaining of being provided unethical medical prescription advice (for example, a doctor might prescribe a specific type of drug even though it might not be actually needed, because he is earning commission from the pharmaceutical company), or that they are encouraged to repeat unnecessary visits to the doctor’s office (for example, a doctor might encourage a patient to visit him every 2 weeks as he is receiving compensation for each visit, despite the fact that the patient might not require such close/often supervision). Especially in cases of private doctor offices, fraudulent behaviour enhanced by monetary rewards, can often be discovered.

A possible way to reduce the prevalence of fraudulent cases such as the ones described above, might be the adoption of a technological infrastructure built by utilising Blockchain technology, that would force doctors to record a patient’s medical history and a list of proposed medication prescriptions. Furthermore, the doctors should be recording the list of patient visits and reasons for visiting. Blockchain technology’s nature, would ensure that transactions being recorded in the system are unalterable and fully auditable, thus allowing the state to review and greatly minimize the occurence of fraudulent cases as the ones described above.

Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize a number of industries and hugely alter our day to day living, and healthcare is only one of them. There are many ways on how Blockchain can be used to improve the efficiency and to reduce time, costs and increase patient service, with the ones stated above being only a handful of the potential applications. What are your thoughts on the above? Please let me know in the comments section and don’t forget to share this article with friends and family.

Petros Leandros, MSc.