The term “blockchain” has become one of the most popular buzzwords in the realm of medical technology, and for a good reason. However, it is also a loaded term due to its ambiguity. The term blockchain is slightly different depending on the industry. This distinction and understanding are especially interesting and beneficial to the healthcare field. Simply stated, blockchain can transform the healthcare industry. Patients may be properly focused on at the heart of all operations once it gets fully deployed, which will get completely revamped with improved security, privacy, and accessibility.
But how does blockchain make all of this possible? You will explore the looming relationship between blockchain and healthcare in this research.
Table of Contents
What Blockchain is For
Blockchain is a sophisticated technology that allows many parties to share and access data securely. In essence, blockchain can aid digital health by securely communicating data across disparate healthcare systems with patient consent.
The most innovative feature of blockchain, delivered through a carefully balanced blend of powerful cryptography and built-in incentives, eliminates the need for a centrally governing authority and instead distributes power among all participants in the blockchain ecosystem.
One of the most significant advantages of a decentralized system is that end-users – particularly consumers and businesses – would have far greater transparency and control over how their data gets utilized. As a result, one of the long-term goals of disruptive blockchain-enabled companies is to decentralize the data economy. Thus, they can reclaim power from companies that centralize large datasets for competitive advantage, rather than placing control over how personal and proprietary data gets used in the hands of people and organizations.
Blockchain Use Cases in Healthcare
New blockchain healthcare use cases emerge every day, potentially transforming the healthcare system. Many healthcare and blockchain startups are working on or have already deployed blockchain-based systems to help both professionals and patients improve their healthcare.
Blockchain is becoming a vital tool for healthcare, transforming the business worldwide by decentralizing patient health records, tracking drugs, and boosting payment choices.
Transparency in the Supply Chain
Assurance of the provenance of medical goods to establish their validity is a key concern in the healthcare sector, as it is in many others. Customers can have complete visibility and transparency of the things they are buying by using a blockchain-based system to trace items from the manufacturing site to each stage of the supply chain.
This transparency is critical for the industry, particularly in developing economies where counterfeit prescription medications are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year. It is also becoming more critical for medical equipment, which is rapidly growing as more remote health monitoring is adopted, attracting the attention of unscrupulous actors.
MediLedger is a notable example of a blockchain system that allows organizations along the prescription drug supply chain to verify the legitimacy of medicines, expiration dates, and other critical data.
FarmaTrust also plans to use its blockchain to solve the same issue.
The blockchain of FarmaTrust will get divided into four sections: Pharmaceutical firms benefit from regulatory compliance since it ensures that they are following government requirements; Track & Trace to control inventory wherever it moves; Supply Chain Visibility for when a drug is changed or altered in any manner; and finally, the Consumer Confidence App allows users to view the medication’s lifespan.
Patient-Centric Electronic Health Records
Every country and area is grappling with the issue of data silos, which means that patients and their healthcare professionals have an incomplete picture of their medical history.
According to a study released by Johns Hopkins University, medical errors resulting from poorly coordinated treatment were the third greatest cause of death in the United States in 2016. These medical errors include planned actions not executed as intended or errors of omission throughout patient records.
One possible answer to this challenge is to develop a blockchain-based medical record system that can be integrated with existing electronic medical record software and serve as a single, encompassing view of a patient’s data. It is important to highlight that actual patient data is not stored on the blockchain. Instead, each new record added to the blockchain, whether a doctor’s note, a prescription, or a test result, is converted into a unique hash function, a short string of letters and numbers. Every hash function is special, and you can only decipher it with the authorization of the data owner — the patient.
Therefore, any change to patient records and the patient’s disclosure consent gets recorded as a blockchain transaction. Medicalchain is a leading example of a company that works with healthcare providers to adopt blockchain-enabled Electronic Medical Records (EMRs).
Credential Verification of Medical Staff
You can use blockchain technology to track the experience of medical professionals in the same way that you can use it to track the provenance of a medical good. To better streamline the hiring process at healthcare organizations, companies are beginning to develop blockchain-based solutions for creating credentials for newly hired staff members. For example, ProCredEx, based in the United States, created a system based on a blockchain protocol for verifying the credentials of medical staff.
Insurance and Supply Chain Settlements with Smart Contracts
Using blockchain-based systems from companies like Chronicled and Curisium, pharmaceutical companies, medical device OEMs, wholesalers, insurers, and healthcare providers, can authenticate their identities like the following:
Organizations
Log contract details
Track transaction of goods and services
Current and passed invoicing details for all goods and services
This type of environment goes beyond supply chain management to enable healthcare trading partners and insurance providers to operate on entirely digital and, in some circumstances, automated contract terms.
Instead of each player having their version of contracts, they can significantly reduce disputes over payment chargeback claims for prescription medicines and other goods by having shared digital agreements between manufacturers, distributors, and healthcare organizations logged on a blockchain ledger.
Conclusion
While many innovative and intriguing blockchain solutions have sprouted from leading organizations worldwide, this is only the start of something bigger. Push the boundaries of medical technology while establishing the groundwork for a data-driven future that will result in massive medical advances: Consider implementing blockchain in the healthcare sector today!
Web3 describes a version of the internet where data will be interconnected in a decentralized way. Web3 is an umbrella that comprises various fields like semantic web, AR/VR, AI at scale, blockchain technologies, and decentralization. The core idea of Web3 moves along the lines of enabling decentralized ownership on the web.
A blockchain protocol is a set of underlying rules that define how a blockchain will work. Based on the underlying rules of the protocol it’s possible to build a business ecosystem. Usually, protocol’s rules comprise everything from how tokens can be issued, how value is created, and how interactions happen on top of the protocol.
In software engineering, a fork consists of a “split” of a project, as developers take the source code to start independently developing on it. Software protocols (the set of rules underlying the software) usually fork as a group decision-making process. All developers have to agree on the new course and direction of the software protocol. A fork can be “soft” when an alteration to the software protocol keeps it backward compatible or “hard” where a divergence of the new chain is permanent. Forks are critical to the development and evolution of Blockchain protocols.
A Merkle tree is a data structure encoding blockchain data more efficiently and securely. The Merkle tree is one of the foundational components of a Blockchain protocol.
The nothing-at-stake problem argues that validators on a blockchain with a financial incentive to mine on each fork are disruptive to consensus. Potentially, this makes the system more vulnerable to attack. This is a key problem that makes possible underlying blockchain protocols, based on core mechanisms like a proof-of-stake consensus, a key consensus system, that together the proof-of-work make up key protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
A 51% Attack is an attack on the blockchain network by an entity or organization. The primary goal of such an attack is the exclusion or modification of blockchain transactions. A 51% attack is carried out by a miner or group of miners endeavoring to control more than half of a network’s mining power, hash rate, or computing power. For this reason, it is sometimes called a majority attack. This can corrupt a blockchain protocol that malicious attackers would take over.
A Proof of Work is a form of consensus algorithm used to achieve agreement across a distributed network. In a Proof of Work, miners compete to complete transactions on the network, by commuting hard mathematical problems (i.e. hashes functions) and as a result they get rewarded in coins.
An Application Binary Interface (ABI) is the interface between two binary program modules that work together. An ABI is a contract between pieces of binary code defining the mechanisms by which functions are invoked and how parameters are passed between the caller and callee. ABIs have become critical in the development of applications leveraging smart contracts, on Blockchain protocols like Ethereum.
A Proof of Stake (PoS) is a form of consensus algorithm used to achieve agreement across a distributed network. As such it is, together with Proof of Work, among the key consensus algorithms for Blockchain protocols (like the Ethereum’s Casper protocol). Proof of Stake has the advantage of security, reduced risk of centralization, and energy efficiency.
Proof-of-Activity (PoA) is a blockchain consensus algorithm that facilitates genuine transactions and consensus amongst miners. That is a consensus algorithm combining proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. This consensus algorithm is designed to prevent attacks on the underlying Blockchain.
According to Joel Monegro, a former analyst at USV (a venture capital firm) the blockchain implies value creation in its protocols. Where the web has allowed the value to be captured at the applications layer (take Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many others). In a Blockchain Economy, this value might be captured by the protocols at the base of the blockchain (for instance Bitcoin and Ethereum).
A Blockchain Business Model is made of four main components: Value Model (Core Philosophy, Core Value and Value Propositions for the key stakeholders), Blockchain Model (Protocol Rules, Network Shape and Applications Layer/Ecosystem), Distribution Model (the key channels amplifying the protocol and its communities), and the Economic Model (the dynamics through which protocol players make money). Those elements coming together can serve as the basis to build and analyze a solid Blockchain Business Model.
Blockchain companies use sharding to partition databases and increase scalability, allowing them to process more transactions per second. Sharding is a key mechanism underneath the Ethereum Blockchain and one of its critical components. Indeed, sharding enables Blockchain protocols to overcome the Scalability Trilemma (as a Blockchain grows, it stays scalable, secure, and decentralized).
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) operates autonomously on blockchain protocol under rules governed by smart contracts. DAO is among the most important innovations that Blockchain has brought to the business world, which can create “super entities” or large entities that do not have a central authority but are instead managed in a decentralized manner.
Smart contracts are protocols designed to facilitate, verify, or enforce digital contracts without the need for a credible third party. These contracts work on an “if/when-then” principle and have some similarities to modern escrow services but without a third party involved in guaranteeing the transaction. Instead, it uses blockchain technology to verify the information and increase trust between the transaction participants.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are cryptographic tokens that represent something unique. Non-fungible assets are those that are not mutually interchangeable. Non-fungible tokens contain identifying information that makes them unique. Unlike Bitcoin – which has a supply of 21 million identical coins – they cannot be exchanged like for like.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to an ecosystem of financial products that do not rely on traditional financial intermediaries such as banks and exchanges. Central to the success of decentralized finance is smart contracts, which are deployed on Ethereum (contracts that two parties can deploy without an intermediary). DeFi also gave rise to dApps (decentralized apps), giving developers the ability to build applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
The history of Bitcoin starts before the 2008 White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. In 1989 first and 1991, David Chaum created DigiCash, and various cryptographers tried to solve the “double spending” problem. By 1998 Nick Szabo began working on a decentralized digital currency called “bit gold.” By 2008 the Bitcoin White Paper got published. And from there, by 2014, the Blockchain 2.0 (beyond the money use case) sprouted out.
An altcoin is a general term describing any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. Indeed, as Bitcoin started to evolve since its inception, back in 2009, many other cryptocurrencies sprouted due to philosophical differences with the Bitcoin protocol but also to cover wider use cases that the Bitcoin protocol could enable.
Ethereum was launched in 2015 with its cryptocurrency, Ether, as an open-source, blockchain-based, decentralized platform software. Smart contracts are enabled, and Distributed Applications (dApps) get built without downtime or third-party disturbance. It also helps developers build and publish applications as it is also a programming language running on a blockchain.
An imaginary flywheel of the development of a crypto ecosystem, and more, in particular, the Ethereum ecosystem. As developers join in and the community strengthens, more use cases are built, which attract more and more users. As users grow exponentially, businesses become interested in the underlying ecosystem, thus investing more in it. These resources are invested back in the protocol to make it more scalable, thus reducing gas fees for developers and users, facilitating the adoption of the whole business platform.
Solana is a blockchain network with a focus on high performance and rapid transactions. To boost speed, it employs a one-of-a-kind approach to transaction sequencing. Users can use SOL, the network’s native cryptocurrency, to cover transaction costs and engage with smart contracts.
In essence, Polkadot is a cryptocurrency project created as an effort to transform and power a decentralized internet, Web 3.0, in the future. Polkadot is a decentralized platform, which makes it interoperable with other blockchains.
Launched in October 2020, Filecoin protocol is based on a “useful work” consensus, where the miners are rewarded as they perform useful work for the network (provide storage and retrieve data). Filecoin (⨎) is an open-source, public cryptocurrency and digital payment system. Built on the InterPlanetary File System.
BAT or Basic Attention Token is a utility token aiming to provide privacy-based web tools for advertisers and users to monetize attention on the web in a decentralized way via Blockchain-based technologies. Therefore, the BAT ecosystem moves around a browser (Brave), a privacy-based search engine (Brave Search), and a utility token (BAT). Users can opt-in to advertising, thus making money based on their attention to ads as they browse the web.
Uniswap is a renowned decentralized crypto exchange created in 2018 and based on the Ethereum blockchain, to provide liquidity to the system. As a cryptocurrency exchange technology that operates on a decentralized basis. The Uniswap protocol inherited its namesake from the business that created it — Uniswap. Through smart contracts, the Uniswap protocol automates transactions between cryptocurrency tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
