Transparency, accountability, data integrity, audits and inspection of data provenance are some of the primary difficulties facing healthcare data management systems. However, the decentralised blockchain system promises healthcare stakeholders unprecedented precision, confidentiality, and security for patients’ information and allows patients more ownership over their medical records.

This article will discuss some of the most promising applications of blockchain in the healthcare industry.

What Is Healthcare Data Management?

Healthcare data management is any system of collecting, processing, and retrieving data gathered during the operations of a health facility or a healthcare supply chain. A proactive healthcare delivery approach, operations cost reduction, and overall patient care improvement are vital benefits of a robust healthcare data management system.

On the business side, quality data equips healthcare providers to make better business decisions such as:

• Buying as many drugs as would be needed based on informed predictions;
• Carrying out transparent doctors’ performance assessments to ensure overall customer satisfaction;
• Analyse the market on specific services for their profitability;
• Identify problem areas in their operations and industry;
• Find opportunities for growth.

While all these look attractive, setting up an effective healthcare data management system is not a walk in the park.

A robust healthcare data management system goes beyond data collection, which can be done using electronic health records (EHR), IoT and wearable devices, CRM systems, Third-party records etc.

Running an effective healthcare data management system also involves:

• Converting collected data into formats convenient for further processing;
• Operating a secure data storage system;
• Data analysis and effective presentation;
• Running the above in a hybrid of manual and automated operation.

What Are the Challenges in Healthcare Data Management?

Centralised Management System

Most healthcare management systems are operated from a centralised system. This leads to the risk of a single point of failure in case of natural disasters.

Drug Fraud

Fake drugs account for 10%-30% of the drugs in circulation worldwide. There is always a risk of counterfeit drugs entering the market during the supply chain cycle (from the manufacturer to wholesale distributors, to retail companies, to consumers).

Fragmented Data

Data arrives from various sources and in varying formats like texts, images, videos, and other file types. This makes it cumbersome to convert them into wholesome data for decision-making.

Data Volatility

When it comes to monitoring dynamic human activities such as health conditions, data is rarely static. There is a need for constant verification and updating.

Privacy and Security

Internal security measures, systems, auditing, and training are required to maintain high-security standards around data protection. Prioritising patients’ health data protection is essential to customer trust retention.

Systems Integration

Different tools can be used to collect, store, and process data in the same healthcare facility. This peculiarity gives rise to compatibility issues.

Regulations and Compliance

With healthcare data, it is a struggle to find a balance between compliance with requirements and usability. Some countries worldwide have strict and complex regulatory environments preventing the full potential of healthcare data from being achieved.

Healthcare Data Storage

Data collected over time becomes huge and needs more extensive storage facilities. While cloud solutions or custom databases could be set up, they have their limits, and there arise issues of cost and security.

Blockchain in Healthcare Data Management

Despite all these challenges, Blockchain can be applied to the healthcare data management system to ensure data security and transparency in the healthcare supply chain.

Blockchain evangelists propose that blockchain technology can provide unprecedented precision, confidentiality, and security of patients’ information in healthcare data management systems.

Features such as decentralised storage, accessibility, data integrity and verification are all built into the system. Below are some crucial ways blockchain technology has been relevant in healthcare data management.

• Boosting patients’ satisfaction with data access & management
• Streamlining the tasks of multidisciplinary care teams.
• Coordinating medication and protecting patients against drug abuse.
• Enhancing the process of identifying and matching patients.
• Drug tracking.
• The blockchain may be the best option to keep patients and their information together without an official national patient identification number (NPIN).
• Real-time data integrity monitoring enables administrators to identify breaches and act timely to limit the damage.

Real-life Application of Blockchain in Healthcare Data Management

Blockchain technology has been applied to solve issues in healthcare data management. Below are some actual cases.

Patientory DApp solution

Patientory was developed to solve the issue of the inability of different EHR systems to communicate with one another. Patientory is a decentralised application (DApp) that uses a private permissioned blockchain to enable patients to provide flexible access to their EMR in a secure yet interoperable manner.

• The DApp has proven to be an invaluable tool for patients in managing fitness and diet.
• Patient’s medical records are stored across multiple nodes in a decentralised and secure way.
• Transaction logs are tamper-proof and immutable.
• Health data are neither stored in a single location nor controlled by a single entity, facilitating the secure, efficient, and simple exchange of EHR between medical facilities.

Estonian E-health System

In Estonia, 95%-99% of patients already had electronic health (e-health) records that can be tracked and accessed in an authorised manner via e-patient portals. In 2016, the Estonian government launched a blockchain-based project to safeguard 1.3 million people’s health records and system access logs.

• The goal of the project is to store the log files that document all data processing actions done on health records.
• They aim to mitigate the risk of data breaches caused by a malicious hacker or a fraudulent insider in the healthcare sector.
• A private digital ledger is used to record and timestamp access to patient medical data, creating an untampered audit trail of the patient data.

Blockchain for Healthcare and Pharma Data in UAE

The Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoHAP) of the UAE recently announced the launch of a blockchain-based platform for storing healthcare data. Think healthcare facilities, medical practitioners, and medications.

The platform is expected to improve storage capacity and strengthen data security across healthcare systems nationwide.

The MoHAP platform is designed to:

• Use MoHAP’s application to streamline the search for health practitioners, their medical license information, pharmaceutical data, and government and private facilities.
• Provides drug’s production, approved agent, active component, and price in the most trustworthy and unchanging manner.
• Keep the track record of healthcare workers and organisations, providing easier verification to government entities.
• Improve data validation and consistency, leading to a high level of transparency and trust in the healthcare sector.
• Improve sustainability and operational efficiency by automating workflow procedures.

Medical Device Tracking in Swiss Hospitals

Swiss hospitals devised a blockchain-based system that effectively tracks medical devices. After getting a consensus from all the hospitals, every transaction was stored in the blockchain.

The device tracking platform is based on hyper ledger technology, a permissioned blockchain. The message formats of all transactions are aligned with the GS1 standard.

• The platform eliminates the need for a third party while ordering medical devices.
• Each transaction step of a particular device in the supply chain is stored in the blockchain platform using a unique identifier.
• Each device is traceable from the manufacturer down to the patient file.

Conclusion

The utilisation of blockchain technology in the healthcare industry is critical because the upkeep of a standard healthcare information system requires many tasks. Some of these tasks include but are not limited to the execution of backup storage services, the maintenance of recovery systems, and the assurance of up-to-date data fields.

An effective healthcare data management system is a body of several moving pieces. The blockchain helps to help each piece in place automatically without offsetting unexpected operational costs and, in some extreme cases, loss of lives.