Health Information Exchange is another time-consuming and complicated process that leads to high healthcare cost.
According to 2016 Breach Barometer Report, 450 breach incidents occurred but information was only available for 380 breach incidents and, the breaches resulted in 27,314,647 affected patient records. Could decentralization solve the data security issues in healthcare? Is it possible to save data securely on the blockchain?
Blockchain will have a considerable impact on a patient’s record sharing, billing, and medical research.
Read further to understand how a blockchain healthcare solution can be built to improve the management of the patient’s health record.
Though healthcare centers are adopting digital technologies, the patient’s medical records are currently stored in the centralized servers. It creates the attack surface for hackers. Accenture’s survey claims one in five employees working in the healthcare is willing to sell the sensitive medical data to the unauthorized parties.
Recently, Grindr dating app has disclosed user’s HIV status, sexuality, GPS position, and other personal details to third-parties. Sharing protected health information of patients without their consent can make them feel traumatized. Once the medical data of an individual is generated, data enrichment is done to make the data secure.
Data Enrichment- Before storing data to the blockchain
Data Enrichment is a process to add value to enhance the data quality.
Patient’s 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 patient’s 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.
Smart contracts ensure the enforcement of the business rules, compliance requirement, and the user’s will before the data is shared or retrieved.
Stakeholders involved in the patient’s treatment can consume the stored data with the patient’s consent.
Similarly, physicians in the healthcare centers could access relevant information such as the patient’s 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
But the centralized approach for maintaining the data could hinder the patient’s privacy. Blockchain could be leveraged to bring trust in the clinical trials and medical research process.
As discussed above, the blockchain healthcare platform could use de-identification for hiding the patient’s identity. So, medical research companies could utilize the non-identifiable records to carry out the research activities.
Here’s what benefits could Blockchain bring to the Healthcare Industry
Control over the data:
Anyone willing to access the health records would require the patient’s public key. Patients could seamlessly control who should access what data.
Since the data is saved in encrypted form, it remains unreadable to the hackers.