Identity thefts, spamming and financial data crimes, the patients data can be misused for many reasons as patients dont have control over their data.
2017 Ponemon Cost of Data Breach Study says that the cost of data breaches for healthcare organizations is estimated to be $380 per record.
Blockchain will have a considerable impact on a patients record sharing, billing, and medical research.
Read further to understand how a blockchain healthcare solution can be built to improve the management of the patients health record.
The medical data includes the doctors prescriptions, X-rays, MRI scans, ultrasound reports, angiography, radiography, endoscopy, and so on. Healthcare data comes in various formats like text, paper, numeric, pictures, videos, digital, or multimedia. IDC reveals healthcare data is expected to grow to 2,314 exabytes by 2020.
Electronic health records(EHR) contain exploitable information like name, address, place where you work, prescribed medicines, number of doctor visits and payment methods. A Medical record also contains sensitive protected health information like HIV diagnoses, cancer diagnoses, or psychological conditions.
Data Enrichment- Before storing data to the blockchain
Data Enrichment is a process to add value to enhance the data quality.
Patients health records need to be accurate, secure, understandable, time-stamped, and structured.
Storing unstructured data could lead to inconsistencies, delays in the treatment process, and inefficiencies.
It is essential to implement the following three steps to clean and secure the data before storing it on the blockchain.
Blockchain can eliminate the risks associated with centralization of data by storing the digital health records across multiple nodes within the network. Even more on Blockchain Healthcare, Patients can share their private key with health organizations: Blockchain healthcare solution can never reveal the patients identifiable information until they provide their private key. Patients can share the private key with the health organizations if required. Data would always remain non-identifiable to healthcare providers without the secret key. It is similar to how cryptocurrencies are stored on the blockchain, where the owner with the private key can only access it.
A blockchain can either be a public or a private blockchain. Since an user identity will not be visible in this solution, a public blockchain could also be used.
Once the data is stored, it can be consumed by different healthcare blockchain vendors using smart contracts.
Similarly, physicians in the healthcare centers could access relevant information such as the patients historical health records, age, and diagnostic reports.
Patients would have ownership of the data, i.e., they can decide what information to be shared with which entity using smart contracts.
Data Mining and AI in Healthcare Blockchain
For example, if a research company wants to get the analytics for HIV disease, smart contracts would enable them to access details like HIV type, most-affected city or country, age group, and gender while hiding the personal information of patients.
Heres what benefits could Blockchain bring to the Healthcare Industry
System Interoperability:
The inability to exchange healthcare records could lead to delays in treatment. But blockchain could alleviate this problem by decentralizing the data. Everyone within the healthcare network could access a transparent, yet immutable ledger while having the ownership of data.
