Data management and security within the healthcare sector is one of the largest challenges with which legacy systems continue to wrestle. While the industry has experienced significant improvements over the years, there remains a more fundamental upgrade to healthcare technology that is yet to experience mass adoption.
The technology in question is blockchain—one that has for the longest time been stymied by limited exploration within the sector. At ZorroSign, we believe it is pivotal to discuss blockchain technology’s benefits, utilisation, and the enhancements it can bring to the wider healthcare ecosystem.
The argument for blockchain in healthcare
Blockchains align ideally with the requirements of modern-day data management solutions, including for healthcare providers, as the industry sees mass adoption of newfound technologies across the board. By design, it offers an accessible, distributed data ledger that is secure, transparent and—more importantly for end-users—efficient in terms of sharing and storing data across the digital landscape.
The universal benefits of this distributed ledger architecture includes stronger security (as data is encrypted and distributed across multiple nodes), greater transparency (as transactions recorded on public blockchains where any node can view them), greater efficiency (automating manual data entry and record keeping processes), and more opportunities for interoperability (as blockchains can connect different healthcare systems and organizations).
Stemming from these fundamental benefits of blockchain, one could begin deriving the host of opportunities that the technology has to offer to stakeholders of the healthcare ecosystem.
A shift from EMRs to EHRs
EMRs, or electronic medical records, are the traditional way of storing patient data. Today, these records are often centralised, meaning that the sole point of access to these records, be it writing or reading them, remains with the healthcare provider and any potential stakeholders they provide with explicit permissions to modify or view them. However, this poses a challenge, as accessing these records by patients or other providers is limited by the centralisation and accompanying data security, an architectural shortcoming that is exacerbated even further when taking into account diagnostic or treatment situations that may require acquisition of EMRs at a rapid pace.
This is where EHRs, or electronic health records, can prove to be an effective solution to a legacy system that has long overstayed its welcome. Simply put, whereas EMRs are the building blocks to data healthcare management systems, EHRs are an entire ecosystem derived from all of the principles EMRs brought with them—requiring increased security through immutability, better transparency through heightened accessibility and accurate record keeping, and greater accessibility through standardisation of record-keeping across entire sectors of the healthcare industry. Blockchain technologies meet those three needs perfectly.
In a future world where EMRs are the norm, healthcare providers from a wide range of disciplines will be able to share, access, write and collaborate on designated blockchains that enable a cross-over of data between different entities. This, in turn, has a host of benefits to multiple end-user stakeholder groups, including patients as a result of their doctors now having access to a more holistic overview of their medical history, and healthcare providers to ensure the most optimal healthcare is provided to the patient.
A wide array of healthcare solutions to come
Beyond medical record keeping, there is a host of various benefits that blockchain can bring with its adoption across the healthcare sector.
For example, researchers and clinical trial groups can accelerate the development of innovative healthcare solutions through collaborative innovation and expedition of clinical trials through immutability of results and data—a key pain point within the modern-day approval cycles for new treatments. Blockchain data storage and sharing can be readily used to manage the data from healthcare research studies to accelerate the pace of research and improve the development of new treatments.
“The growing digitization of medical care has advanced the acknowledgment of issues about secure storage, accessing of patients’ medical records, ownership, and medical data from associated sources,” explains a recent National Library of Medicine article. “Blockchain is recommended as a method of addressing critical issues faced by healthcare, for instance, protected sharing of health records and adherence to data privacy laws.”
Another industry challenge blockchain addresses is that of supply chain management and logistical pipelines. Blockchains can better track the movement of medical supplies and medications with the technology’s immutable and transparent recordkeeping. This can help to ensure the safety and quality of these products, and it can also reduce fraud.
“Currently, most medical and pharmaceutical supply chains are facing significant logistical challenges, including a lack of real-time visibility into shipment locations, uncertainty transportation disruptions, product quality tracking and verification, cross-border customs reporting across borders, and complicated invoicing and payments,” write Jayendra S. Jadhav and Jyoti Deshmukh in a ScienceDirect article. “A blockchain-based supply chain, on the other hand, could track every step for every item immutably, transparently, and efficiently.”
Further, blockchains can be used to better process payments for healthcare services (patient and insurers), helping to reduce costs and improve efficiency. For example, “Insurers can now work with digital transformation platforms to design and develop blockchain technologies to target specific needs instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Julien Breteau in recent The Digital Insurer article.
While these are just some of the baseline enhancements that the industry can look forward to, there is so much more that can be done to increase overall value to stakeholders across the sector.
That’s why ZorroSign is taking a stance in enhancing healthcare
ZorroSign, from its inception, has been an advocate for, and user of, blockchain solutions across the medical data management value chain. By ensuring HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance through our data security platform, ZorroSign has empowered healthcare providers around the globe to become more efficient, secure, and transparent in working with digital document workflows.
We continue to empower healthcare providers by increasing holistic security through the utilisation of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, facilitating the provision of legally binding signatures that feature signatory attribution to ensure immutable and legally admissible security certificates, and driving overall costs down through automation and digitisation of records that optimise efficiency.
We are committed to being a significant proponent of the change that blockchain has to offer within the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers know the value of serving more patients with the same staff, plus saving costs with digital technologies that help meet regulatory compliance while reducing paper, printing, and storage expenses.
By being a part of the technology’s infrastructural implementation within the region, we believe that blockchain technology will revolutionise the modus operandi of healthcare data management and security systems, ensuring that all stakeholders across the healthcare sector—from patients and providers, to insurers, government agencies, and public health organisations, benefit.
