Today, at the hard times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fear that people are facing on a daily basis, healthcare institutions play an even more important role in protecting lives by ensuring our physical, mental, and emotional health, and maintaining the stability of the whole country by providing above-mentioned services. However, as with every system on this planet, the medical sphere has its own problems and gaps for improvement, that could help in the diagnosis and curing of diseases by tracking every step of the treatment and securing data about patients.
Have you ever thought how important it can be to do everything fast to save a person’s life? Have you ever thought that every little step can bring us to the future with a sustainable and fast-working healthcare sphere? — If not, our team of 3IPK would like to show you a new world, where we all can live and feel secured and protected with innovative solutions brought by IT technologies. One of them is blockchain technology, which provides traceability, transparency and data protection.
PROBLEMS IN THE AREA OF HEALTHCARE DATA
A huge range of difficulties in the medical sphere is connected to the data incompleteness and related inconveniences.
There are quite a few of examples of such cases:
1.Visiting new doctors means filling the forms of your health history, again and again, so you have this information for every new medicine worker, or sometimes the health evidence can be lost. What if a doctor cannot access your most recent blood test? — The answer is simple, you have to do it again, but it can take your time, your money, and most important — your health, or even life, in some cases.
2.The process of a patient’s treatment can be long and with a lot of phases, that’s why it is significant to hold every step and every piece of information in a good structured and understandable way. Such information should not be lost by anybody. But can the healthcare institution guarantee this? — Of course they should, and no one is arguing, but they cannot guarantee it 100%.
3.Another one, but not less important is the errors in handwritten medical prescriptions. According to the study, held by Italian medicine workers, such a mistake accounts for 70% of the total in the healthcare industry. It contains a wide range of examples: wrong number in the dosage, wrong letter in the drug goods, or the name of a patient. These errors can lead to uncomfortable situations and even to the harm of health.
4.Data security. We all do want our data to be private and secured by the health institutions, however, it is not always so. You should not search for special cases, or google till midnight to find an example, because one of them has happened recently — more than 100 000 profiles of people who have fought the coronavirus in Moscow, Russia were hacked and stolen from the servers. Therefore, now this information is in the hands of inappropriate people, we can ensure that.
After reading the problems related to data management in the hospitals, and medical institutions, you can have one simple question — “Can it all be prevented?”, and the answer is simple as always — “Yes”. Our team of 3IPK is going to show you how with the use of a new technology based on blockchain, the governments can help the citizens and healthcare providers to be more efficient, with secured data and how they can help in the fight against our today’s common enemy — COVID-19.
SOLUTIONS THAT BLOCKCHAIN BRINGS TO THE MARKET
“There has been a lot of health and wellness related data that has been collected by care providers and individuals, but it has not been converted in consumable formats that enable a comprehensive individualized care plan that contributes to effective long term patient wellness,” — wrote Ramkrishna Prakash, CEO of TrustedCare, Inc., in a paper submitted in response to the Office of the National Coordinator’s call for insight into blockchain in healthcare.
Blockchain for the healthcare industry can be used in various ways.
Improving the data security, authenticity and access is one of the most crucial ones, that can protect the patient, as well as the health institution, because every single part of the information that needs to be updated, should go through a series of cryptographic criteria that confirm the identity of the entity making the record.
Such a solution will be able to solve the problems described above, because now the patient who is coming to a new doctor, won’t have to fill the forms again and again, but the whole information will be put in a special register, in which both sides of healthcare relationships could see the detailed data, that cannot be easily changed, or manipulated.
A treatment process will be all recorded in the special system as well, so now the doctor can be highly sure about the patient’s health status and how exactly he or she has to be cured.
“Every pointer a doctor logs on the blockchain would become part of a patient’s record, no matter which electronic system the doctor was using — so any caregiver could use it without worrying about incompatibility issues” — said John Halamka, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Therefore, using blockchain will make the area of healthcare more dynamic, faster, efficient and more caring about every single patient that has to go through some treatment process.
BLOCKCHAIN AND A PANDEMIC
As the whole world has been facing the pandemic since 2020, and a lot of people have gone through hard times losing their jobs, and loved ones, it is not appropriate to say that the COVID-19 outbreak could have been prevented, but we should talk about how strict and structured measures can reduce the consequences and potentially stop the spread by implementing them.
Under measures, we are talking about the blockchain solution in traceability, transparency and a higher degree of control, that can help in improving detectability of infected cases, outbreak places managing, or securing the medical supply chain.
The technology can be used in tracking the data about every patient in one place during the new diseases: their symptoms, their contacts, their way of treatment, and the information will not be lost, or transferred to some “bad hands”. This will lead to a better understanding of the appearance of viruses, and the issuance of medical prescriptions. Besides, the government and health organizations will be able to monitor the situation in a region and worldwide.
The crisis situations can happen any time, and organizations, like the World Health Organization, would be able to share the verified, and non-changed information about the state of affairs. Moreover, this international organization is already working on a project connected to blockchain to make our planet safer.
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THIS?
In the period of Industry 4.0, it can be very inappropriate not to use innovative technologies in one of the most significant and critical spheres for the functioning of the country — healthcare. Especially if such a technology can save a life, prevent the consequences of future pandemics, and simply-said, make life easier without extra bureaucracy.
Our team of 3IPK understands, develops and delivers such solutions to a lot of today’s areas, allowing them to be cost-saving, efficient and helpful, using blockchain technology and taking the best from innovative revolutions, which are happening around the globe.
