Blockchain technology has evolved and attracted considerable interest from various sectors in the recent decade, including banking, government, energy, and health. In reality, the field’s continuous study is advancing at a rapid pace. There are various use cases for blockchain technology found at this time, such as exchanging electronic medical data, monitoring patients from a distance, and the supply chain for pharmaceuticals. For more precise information on what determines the value of bitcoin click here.
Basic Blockchain Concepts
To better grasp the rest of the article, we’ll go through the fundamentals of blockchain technology in this part.
Blockchain Overview and Architecture
When it came into markets in 2008 as part of the Bitcoin project, blockchain was a peer-to-peer network built on top of the operating system. Each block’s title contains a hash of the block before it. The blocks are arranged in a linked list, with each block structure building on the one before it. In the blockchain world, a transaction is a discrete task put in a public block. A majority of something like the system’s members must agree on each trade before it can be considered valid.
Blockchain: Uses in Healthcare
Healthcare is one area where blockchain is to have considerable potential. In 2016, the Office of something like the Office of Information Technology (ONC) created an ideation challenge for asking white papers on the possible use of cryptocurrencies in healthcare, understanding the relevance and usefulness of this technology. A few blockchain-based healthcare apps were born as a result of this problem. This section focuses on the most critical research, divided into numerous categories: electronic medical, remote medical, pharmaceutical supply chain, and health insurance claims.
Medical Records on the Internet
The focus should be on improving medical data management by connecting diverse systems and increasing the accuracy of Electronic Medical records (EHRs) to change healthcare. Although the words electronic health records (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHRs) are efficiently helping interchangeably, there’s also a distinction to be made. It initially used the term electronic medical records (EMRs), and it refers to a digital counterpart of the paper maps kept by clinicians.
When it comes to patient care, EHRs take a holistic approach, looking at the patient as a whole, not just the clinical data obtained in the doctor’s Office. According to the results of the mapping research, blockchain technology is helpful in the administration of electronic health records. The MedRec implementation proposed by Ekblaw et al. manages authentication, permissions, and data exchange across healthcare stakeholders in this study. To provide patients with knowledge and information about who has access to their healthcare information, MedRec platform.
Monitoring of Patients from a Distance
Remote patient monitoring includes collecting medical data from smartphones, body area sensors, and Internet (Internet of Things) devices to keep tabs on the patient’s condition. The use of blockchain technology is critical for securely storing, distributing, and retrieving biological data obtained from a distance. Griggs et al. show how Bitcoin smart contracts facilitate automated treatments in a safe setting using real-time patient monitoring software. Other ways show the enormous potentials of the Web of Things (IoT) in various areas, notably in e-health, where it is widely explored and deployed. The IoBHealth data-flow architecture proposed by Ray et al. integrates IoT with blockchain, so we may use it to retrieve, store and manage e-health data in this approach.
Chain of Distribution for Pharmaceuticals
The pharmaceutical business has also found blockchain applications. When patients get substandard or counterfeit pharmaceuticals, it can have life-threatening effects. Modum.io AG, a firm that employs blockchain to create data immutability, is presented by Bocek et al. This start-up makes pharmaceutical product temperature data available to the public to check compliance with quality control temperature criteria while in transit. In addition to writers address counterfeit medications by proposing a secure, immutable, and traceable supply chain using blockchain technology to avoid counterfeiting.
Insurance Claims for Medical Treatment
Health insurance claims are one of the healthcare industries that can gain from immutability, openness, and all data stored on the blockchain. A significant area whereby blockchain has the potential to help with healthcare insurance claims is [10]. However, there are just a few working prototypes of these systems. A ledger medical insurance solution called MIStore [26] offers companies secured and immutable medical insurance data. As we’ve seen, most of these apps are on well-known blockchain frameworks like Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric.
