Blockchain in the Healthcare Sector

The healthcare industry is grappling with several challenges of providing high quality patient care that too at a reduced cost. Apart from this, stringent federal regulations requiring suppliers and providers to be in compliance with each other are also adding to the industry pressure. With the healthcare ecosystem becoming more complex due to the presence multiple participants and entities, the need to have a robust, secure and scalable system in place is accentuated.

Blockchain - A technology built on distributed architecture can help address the pain points of the healthcare industry while drive better industry performance, improve the quality of healthcare at a reduced cost.

How Blockchain can Alleviate the Pain Points of Healthcare Industry?

Data Fragmentation:

Data constitutes lot of significance for patients, providers, payers, researchers and other healthcare participants. However, since, the data is fragmented and dispersed amongst various stakeholders, including payers, providers, financial institutions and regulatory bodies, its effective utilization becomes difficult. An IoT powered Blockchain system allows decentralized storage of data across a chain of nodes or computers thereby making the data accessible to every participant that too in real-time.

System Interoperability:

Traditional and centralized method of data storage and sharing have been prone to errors and duplication. Blockchain, allows seamless sharing of information while eliminates all the inconsistencies of the legacy system. The smart contract functionality offers an in-built authentication control that aptly manages patient contracts by eliminating the need for intermediaries. This increases efficiencies and reduces administrative costs.

Settlement of Claims:

Time required for Settlement of claims is a major source of pain that plagues the industry. Blockchains smart contract application, which defines the contract terms and conditions between the payer and the provider comes into action once the claim is submitted following which the claim is processed in real-time and the payment is transmitted to the provider.

Data Security/Privacy:

Being a distributed and decentralized technology, the data uploaded on Blockchain is immutable as every block that gets uploaded on the blockchain is timestamped with hashes thereby ruling out the possibility of data theft or fraud. Furthermore, patients get a transparent and holistic view of their medical history or data, which they can manage as per their convenience. In other words, patient identities/ privacy could be protected with Blockchain allowing secure sharing of data.

Drug Counterfeiting:

One of the major issues that threats the integrity of pharma supply chain is drug counterfeiting. To curb the issue of fake/substandard drugs, the DSCSA (Drug Supply Chain Security Act) requires pharma companies to optimize their supply chain by tracing the provenance of drugs, verifying the authenticity of drugs, detecting suspicious products while ensuring strict adherence to regulatory guidelines for licensing and reporting. With an IoT powered Blockchain system in place, pharma companies can easily deal with the pressing issue of drug counterfeiting.

Patient Data Life Cycle:

Today’s centralized method of storing patient data lacks interoperability, which has resulted in a fragmented electronic medical record (EMR or EHR) ecosystem across several healthcare institutions. Blockchain – a distributed ledger technology has the potential to support the entire patient data lifecycle by recording all the data regarding a patient’s health, as well as the transactions occurring during patient care.

Why Sofocle?

Sofocle Technologies - a leading name in the Blockchain space offers enterprise Blockchain solutions to organizations across different industry verticals. In the healthcare space, we offer healthcare providers with a robust solution that can tackle the challenges of security, interoperability, scalability, and privacy in the healthcare ecosystem. Our team of experts have the dexterity to create HIPPA compliant solutions that can address the specific requirements of your healthcare business. Our integrated solution helps users to share health data with researchers and providers thereby creating a chain of tamper proof information.