Introduction

"Blockchain" is one of the most popular buzzwords used in the medical technology industry. This is valid justification. Simply said, blockchain has the power to completely transform the healthcare industry. Patients may be put squarely at the centre of all operations with its full implementation, which will also completely restructure operations with greater security, privacy, and accessibility. But how precisely does blockchain make this possible? How is the health sector making the most of this very advanced technology? In this article, we try to find the answers for these most-asked questions.

About Blockchain

Let's first explore blockchain in more detail. A distributed system that creates and preserves data records is known as a blockchain. It keeps track of connected "blocks" of data that show how data is exchanged, modified, or viewed on its peer-to-peer network in a digital ledger.

Any transaction involving a linked device will result in identical blocks being generated by all devices on the same blockchain system. A block is formed to locally preserve that information on every device if the data on one machine is accessed, altered, shared, or otherwise affected in any manner. This makes it simple to spot data changes. It is a decentralised strategy that enables data parity to be attained by comparing the blocks of every connected device.

Data is not just recorded and compared; "hashing" is also used. Every block is assigned a unique hash that varies according to its contents. The hash of a block would change if the block's contents did.

This is significant since blocks are kept in chronological order and also make direct use of the hash of the block before them. As a result, attempting to modify the data of one block would instantly result in the identification of a hash change by a following block. For this reason, linked blocks create a "chain" that is safely crafted in a decentralised, immutable way.

Blockchain technology makes it nearly difficult to imitate, distort, or otherwise falsify data since it is precise, secure, and a catalyst for absolute responsibility. This presents a number of opportunities, the most important of which is the interchange, storage, and access of data between linked parties.

Impact of Blockchain on the Medical Industry

Blockchain technology may be used in the medical sector in a number of ways since it is open and very secure, which will result in drastically lower prices and new methods for people to obtain treatment.

Futureproofing technology may also be used to encourage an era of development and innovation due to the compounding properties of data and invention. Leading businesses are already building the groundwork for a blockchain revolution. Here is how they are changing the medical field.

The effectiveness of care coordination and the capacity to link data to patients across the care continuum strongly influence clinical decision-making. The authors of one of the winning papers Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center submitted said that multi-institutional, lifelong medical record management was not something that EHRs were intended for.

Instead, they suggested MedRec, a blockchain-based solution that enables patients to approve updates to their EHRs, provide access to new physicians, and control provider sharing. The technique also has the potential to improve clinical decision-making by boosting patient confidence in the data available at the point of care, which may be a big problem.

Below are some of the impacts Blockchain laid on the Healthcare Industry.

1. HEALTHCARE DATA SECURITY- Healthcare data security may be greatly impacted by blockchain as well. All health systems and organisations place a high focus on protecting patient data, but for clinicians, the growing amount of data and management-related concerns provide substantial challenges. Blockchain technology, which employs immutable ledgers that are continuously updated concurrently on all participating network nodes, might be useful in this situation. This indicates that, unlike in a central repository, there isn't a single point from which data may be altered.

Although offering several insecure gateways could potentially be a concern, blockchain is intended to reduce this risk. Blockchains use distinctive signatures or "chains" to link all the data "blocks" that come before and after. Instead of changing the old block when data within a block has to be modified, a new block is introduced to indicate the update. This records every piece of data that is added or changed and includes timestamps.

Blockchains also function via decentralised consensus, which calls for unanimous agreement among all participants in the consortium using the blockchain on the procedures for validating and recording data. For a malicious actor to try to take advantage of this and manipulate the data, they would need to take over the majority of the network's nodes at once and change the whole blockchain pertaining to the data they are aiming for. Although not impossible, this is quite challenging because to the extensive network of nodes in the healthcare industry.

2. FOG COMPUTING AND THE INTERNET OF THINGS- Patient-generated health data is crucial for gathering, evaluating, and using in the healthcare industry (PGHD). IoT gadgets including wearables, home scales, blood glucose monitors, telehealth tools, mHealth applications, and other technologies are what cause PGHD. Although this data can improve clinical treatment greatly, it can also be inconsistent and poorly defined. When you add this to the significant quantity of PGHD produced, the issue is obvious.

PGHD must be unambiguous, succinct, and almost immediate in order to be effective. Real-time analytics are made possible by these features, and they can be applied in urgent situations to stop serious patient injury or death. Real-time analytics, which enable data to be uploaded from the device to the cloud, have become increasingly important to many enterprises thanks to cloud computing. The analytics engine is then supplied the pertinent data, which is then processed and presented to the physicians.

Unfortunately, this approach can take some time, and in an emergency, it could be too much time. This issue has been addressed via fog computing. By placing a layer of computation between the device and the cloud, fog computing enables IoT devices to do analytics on their own. As a result, clinical decisions can be made more quickly and the cloud pipeline may be used for extensive analytics.

The capacity of fog computing to transform IoT devices into small data centres might also be used to share health data among enterprises. Patient health data may be transferred across devices using a common interface and a fog computing system with preset user and authorisation policies. However, the original hospital or doctor's office is the only place where any data changes or edits take place.

Hospitals, payers, pharmacies, doctors, and other healthcare stakeholders would be able to access portions of the same EHR based on permissions, rather than having to send a brand-new record each time one entity needed to make a change. Blockchains distribute and update ledgers on each network node in a manner similar to this. Therefore, the security and data integrity standards of blockchain technology might be advantageous to the fog computing environment.

Conclusion

Users would be able to see and alter specific datasets via blockchain, and all devices would have simultaneous access to the most recent data. Blockchain prohibits illegal data tampering and is very difficult to hack due to the way it is structured, allaying privacy and security concerns common to various data-sharing schemes. It would be necessary to create blockchain-specific security and privacy procedures, but doing so might have a big benefit. In this regard, Skillslash can be credited to train students on blockchains and many other disciplines, such as Data Science course in Bangalore, data analytics, etc and have them ready for application of their knowledge into the practical world. With features such as 100% Job Guarantee, Real-time Work Experience, Customizable Courses, Training to get recruited in FAANG and top-tech companies, Project certification from top startups etc. Therefore, one can trust this blooming ed-tech company and sore high in this domain.