Impacts of Blockchain in Healthcare
The world has experienced a lot of improvements in technology in the past decades. One of the most recent and disruptive technology is Blockchain which is adopted by numerous industries including healthcare. Blockchain is defined as a decentralized, distributed, digital archive which records transactions in many computers. This essay describes the impacts of Blockchain technology in healthcare.
Blockchain technology is set to transform the healthcare systems for better performance owing to its potential impacts. One of the impacts such technology has on the healthcare industry is on the health records. A great challenge facing the healthcare IT regards creating high integrity records of the patients (Bean & Stephen, 2018). In this regard, blockchain provides a highly disjointed healthcare record. Accordingly, this technology prevents the alteration of data in a single system without changing the information on other computers. As a result, the authenticity of data and accuracy is highly maintained.
Another impact concerns the revenue cycle, reconciliation, and fraud. Consistent tracking of the flow of services and money has posed a great challenge in the healthcare industry. The complexity associated with the nature of healthcare systems makes billions of dollars to be expended in an attempt to track the services offered to the patients (Hasselgren et al., 2019). In this regard, enormous amounts of money and time are spent in amending the disagreements that arise between the insurance industries and healthcare providers since each keeps its records. Blockchain technology provides the ability to track such transactions in a high integrity manner, and hence eliminating similar disputes (Hasselgren et al., 2019). As a result, most of the errors in the healthcare system are eradicated concerning financial and patient care plusses and hence, reducing fraud.
Blockchain also provides improved drug traceability. Various studies indicate that patients are exposed to more health risks such as drug dependence and addiction owing to the cases of counterfeit drugs. Blockchain technology poses as a solution to ensure the active ingredients in drugs are not altered and maintain their authorized proportions (Linn, & Koo, 2016). This prompts the need for secure tracking of the drug supply chain. In this regard, technology plays an important role to enhance patient safety and their trust in the healthcare industry.
Despite the benefits of blockchain technology in the healthcare recording system, the idea is still contentious. While patients benefit in gaining access to their records, inapt access to medical antiquities may arise. In this regard, high cases of privacy breaches may result from the increasing accessibility of data. Literally, blockchain has a promising future but its implementation should be made cautiously with intense consultations with the relevant stakeholders to ensure a responsible regulation (Linn, & Koo, 2016). Additionally, while data stability is a benefit associated with this technology, it still poses as a shortcoming. Data modification is impossible once it has been added to the system. In this regard, if the need to alter information in the blockchain code arises, a lot of work is required to achieve such an objective, which may be costly and time-consuming.
Generally, Blockchain is a current technology that poses as a solution to most of the challenges facing the healthcare industry. The technology is set to address challenges such as health record-keeping, and reduction of fraud in the healthcare systems. Nonetheless, it has some downsides including difficulty in data modification. In this regard, precautions must be considered when implementing blockchain technology in the healthcare industry.
References
Bean, R., & Stephen, G. (2018). How Blockchain is impacting healthcare and life sciences today. Jersey City: Forbes.
Hasselgren, A., Kralevska, K., Gligoroski, D., Pedersen, S. A., & Faxvaag, A. (2019). Blockchain in healthcare and health sciences–a scoping review. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 104040.
Linn, L. A., & Koo, M. B. (2016). Blockchain for health data and its potential use in health it and health care related research. In ONC/NIST Use of Blockchain for Healthcare and Research Workshop. Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States: ONC/NIST (pp. 1-10).