The current blockchain approach serves the healthcare industry in many ways – improving the supply chain, eliminating counterfeit drugs, improving data storage and security. Blockchain for the enterprise could actually save lives. But how? Let’s take a look at how the healthcare industry is really thriving thanks to blockchain for the enterprise
Challenges of today’s healthcare system
Counterfeit medicines
The healthcare supply chain has one of the biggest challenges. Counterfeit drugs cause a lot of damage not only to people but also to the healthcare industry. Without proper control, many medicines are counterfeited every year.
About 10% -30% of medicines are counterfeit and many people get sick every day. Right now, the market for counterfeit drugs is over $200 billion dollars a year. This means that about 1/3 of the medicines supplied are counterfeit.
Data Segmentation
Another problem in this industry is the problem of data segmentation. Usually a lot of important information such as patient data is scattered all over the network. And so when it is needed, no one can find the right information at the right time.
So when doctors need to know the patient’s medical history, they cannot get all the information at once. Thus, doctors cannot provide the patient with the treatment they need.
Poor management
The management system of the healthcare industry is not up to the mark. They cannot offer an efficient system where everything is streamlined.
Health care and data storage
Often someone misuses valuable information about medical data. Moreover, selling this information to outside companies jeopardizes patient privacy. Also, many people are misled by flawed clinical trial reports.
How blockchain can help
- Enable interoperability between systems
- Provide a higher level of security
- Provide lower cost of care
- Ensure data integrity
- Offer universal access
Blockchain applications for healthcare
Clinical trials
Blockchain can improve clinical trial monitoring by eliminating fraud and data manipulation. Using the platform, they can store all information in a ledger and further simplify the output. It will also greatly improve healthcare itself.
Claims and billing
The billing process is quite complex and takes up a lot of precious time. By removing intermediaries, blockchain can improve both claims and billing in healthcare. Sometimes, bad intermediaries tend to bill more than they are phakeically. Thus, blockchain for enterprise will get rid of such bad players.
Drug Tracking
As you already know, counterfeiting of medicines is a huge problem. But blockchain for enterprise can offer timestamps for medicines and transactions to solve it. It can solve the problem of recognizing counterfeiting by providing time-fixed immutable transactions across the supply chain.
Patient data management
Blockchain can be used to store data securely. It improves personalization and pinpointing of patient data.
Blockchain for public services
Law enforcement
If governments use public blockchain, they can fight money laundering. A public blockchain will monitor the process of legal transactions and work whenever they see a bad player.
Taxation
The taxation process is overly complicated every year and many people don’t even pay taxes even though they should. Thus, governments lose valuable tax money every year.
Legislation. Reports
Legislative records are one of the most important elements of government. If they can make them fully digitized, they can keep better records of them. Moreover, blockchain for enterprise networks can really help here.
Welfare distribution
The government’s welfare projects suffer from systemic loss and mismanagement. Adopting enterprise blockchain in this can significantly reduce system losses and offer better governance on welfare issues.
Healthcare services
As you already know, the healthcare industry can shine with blockchain, and governments can be the ones to adopt this technology in the industry.
Digitized Identities
What’s the best way to have blockchain for corporate networks within governments to preserve public rights of way? If governments can offer digital identities, the problems with identity theft will decrease dramatically.
Cyber security
Government infrastructures have a very old network system that makes it susceptible to hacking. But they can use enterprise blockchain to combat cyberattacks.