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People live longer in the 21st century, but what is less recognized is that, despite our growing longevity, we are also getting worse. According to the research, the number of people over 65 years affected by at least four medical conditions is increasing by 100 percent by 2035. As you can imagine, such an increase in the disease will impose more and more weight on medical institutions and services, with the implication that we – as a global community – need to find new innovative ways to tackle diseases.
Fortunately, the crypt is available to help this emerging crisis. It will not be a panacea for the ills of our distressed health systems, but in a number of important ways, blockchains and cryptocurrencies could help the health sector cope with the growing workload over the years and decades to come. By increasing the security and transparency of medical data, they could give patients greater assurance that their personal information is protected, which in turn could increase confidence in medical institutions and make people more inclined to put their lives in the hands of health workers. And by providing medical research companies with greater access to funding, they would accelerate progress in the discovery of drug treatments, thus saving lives and reducing disease.
However, the application of blockchain technology in the health industry will not be an entirely seamless process, given the need to first establish an effective encryption and given the fact that most blockchains still have to overcome various technical challenges before being able to serve thousands – if not millions – of patients. But once you meet these challenges, those working in space believe it will make a radical difference.
Data efficiency
The first and most important thing to note about the growing use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in health care is that it is not primarily about the actual treatment process, but rather about the way the data deriving from the treatment are processed and archived.
At the beginning of November 2018, Myongji Hospital in South Korea became one of the last global institutions to look to the DLT, after announcing it would collaborate with the Korean computer company BICube to develop a data exchange system based on blockchain. As explained in the press release, this system would be partially private and partially public, allowing patients to approve the transfer of their medical data from one health institution to another.
Other recently announced systems are set to work the same way, although with minimal differences in each specific case. In Austria, the national government has offered its financial support to Lancor Scientific, which is building a cancer screening tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) that has an accuracy rate of 90% (human pathologists reach only 60-70% accuracy for cervical cancer). In addition to using artificial intelligence, Lancor will also use its proprietary blockchain to store data obtained from its screening tool. And as its white paper clarifies, a patient can access this data using the platform's Medical token, which activates smart contracts that release data relevant to him or her (or an approved third party).
According to Lancam CEO Aamir Butt, blockchain technology will primarily be applied to medical data, but this will still allow healthcare professionals and institutions to target treatment more effectively. He told Cointelegraph:
"Blockchain technology helps to better target groups at risk for cancer screening because the data available is better: patients have their health data when blockchain technology is used, so data has a much greater integrity of what can be achieved in other data models For example, between 5% and 20% of NHS data is not specifically related to a patient, and in the United States, health data are related to a patient event rather than to a patient ".
In fact, other platforms have been launched that seek to harness the power of the blockchain to integrate masses of data and make information readily accessible, thus doing so as to improve the effective treatment process – and often in a more cost-effective way. . One of these platforms is Skychain, which is combining DLT and AI to build a distributed network of artificial neural networks (ie artificial brains) that potentially diagnose medical conditions more successfully than human professionals. Similarly, Doc.com (also known as Docademic) provides users of its mobile app with access to doctors and medical professionals from around the world. His CEO, Charles Nader, told Cointelegraph that his use of cryptocurrency will encourage other potential users (patients and professionals) to interact with the platform, which will ultimately create more useful data.
"[Blockchain] it certainly adds value as you have economic incentives to add more data and access information in one place. This incentive to add data would be the cryptocurrency that interacts with the blockchain. And since more data is entered into the blockchain, the information will be much more useful. "
Not only does the blockchain provide incentives to add more data to health care systems, but it will actually encourage people to show up for their appointments. Healthereum is another company that builds a blockchain-based platform that will allow patients to be treated by doctors around the world, but in contrast to many of its rivals, it will actually reward patients with their token to show up for appointments – and punish them for not showing up. And as its CEO and founder, Steve Y. Chung, explains to Cointelegraph, this will do much to solve one of the biggest problems in the healthcare industry.
"Missing presentations affect health care providers in each country. Failure to submit breaks the relationship which then upsets downstream health care. [we] tackle this no-show problem with the appointment gamification. Healthereum encourages adherence to appointments which then leads to better health ".
Safety?
Of course, at a time when privacy concerns and personal data are becoming increasingly important, the ability to generate masses of personal data could be worrisome. However, Aamir Butt states that the cryptographic and distributed aspects of blockchain technology provide a reliable way to minimize data security threats:
"The use of cryptographic handshakes before data is transferred ensures that the correct information is assigned to the right patient and the correct tests are performed to plan and deliver the correct future care. the use of counterfeit devices, the charging of patients for non-executed tests and others – is relevant all over the world, but especially in developing countries. Using devices on the blockchain, using these handshakes critiques, the opportunities for fraud have fallen dramatically. "
DLT not only promises to improve data security and reduce the chances of medical fraud, but it could also allow the connection of multiple national medical data systems. As Butt explains, the prevailing systems in the United Kingdom, the United States and other developed countries currently create fragmented data silos, which means that it is difficult to access aggregate data, exacerbated by the lack of data integrity. "
Fortunately, blockchain enables a new model for patient data management. "In a distributed ledger, the database is distributed across the network, maintaining transaction integrity through encryption," Butt says.
Research and financing
As data is becoming an integral part of global health systems, and as it is increasingly created, health care now offers one of the clearest use cases for DLT. That said, the role of blockchains in medicine is not limited to better data management, but also to funding – something that can improve results in drug discovery and medical research.
In September, the pharmaceutical company based in California, Verseon, launched its own stock exchange, which will allow decentralized, blockchain-based trading in tokenized securities. It might seem like a strange thing for a pharmaceutical company, but as CEO Adityo Prakash tells Cointelegraph, it will open up new possibilities for the health industry:
"Securing funding is also very important for the development of new drugs and other health technologies. Needless to say, improvements in the health sector are critically dependent on new medical innovations: using blockchain technology to drive regulation sales and securities sales tokenized, Verseon is trying to change the way life sciences innovations are funded, who can participate and enjoy the potential gains. "
Verseon is not the only platform launched with the promise of improving the quality of medical research. In March, Medable, based in California, announced its Insight platform, which allows medical researchers to share data and other information-based resources. This not only reduces the cost of the research, but Insight will also reward those who share new data with the blockchain-based platform, with rewards in the form of funding and medical technology.
obstacles
The fact that the blockchain has a potentially bright future in the health sector is also indicated by the growing role it is having in medical insurance and medical licenses, where MetLife and the state government of Illinois have tested DLT-based systems that they will guarantee the corresponding data. However, as promising as it seems, there are a number of family challenges that need to be overcome before the blockchain technology enjoys widespread adoption.
For one, blockchain-based health platforms will need to be able to scale and manage multiple transactions at speed. However, as Luxcore's marketing director Brian Dors explains, at Cointelegraph, they will also need to be interoperable with each other, which will require the completion of imminent multi-chain platforms such as Polkadot, Cosmos, Icon and others.
"Currently, it is difficult for several blockchains to communicate with each other, particularly if they are built on different platforms and use different consensus rules, which represents a significant obstacle to implementation in a multi-stakeholder health care environment."
There is also the perennial issue of regulation. "In order for the blockchains to realize their full potential for democratization of access to investment opportunities, the issuing and trading of security tokens must comply with regulations," says Adityo Prakash.
And aside from regulation, there is the obvious challenge of spreading awareness of the blockchain, so that professionals and the public will be inclined to adopt DLT-based health platforms. But as Doc.com's Charles Nader informs Cointelegraph, the financial incentives provided by cryptocurrencies can provide an effective way to circumvent this problem:
"One of the main challenges is to make the general population aware of the blockchain and the benefits of using this technology.In addition to this, the incentives must be in place so that people are willing to share their health information with third parties on blockchain.This is something that only blockchain can facilitate, because it can reward its users with cryptocurrency for entering data into the blockchain. "
Together, all this indicates that the blockchain still has ways to move forward, before it can keep its promises in the medical sector. But as this sector has become increasingly "data" in recent years, it is ripe to benefit from decentralized and cryptographically secure data power.
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