Blockchain provides us with a tremendous opportunity to overcome challenges that exist in the healthcare industry today, including interoperability, security, integrity, traceability and universal access.
Blockchain addresses current challenge for syncing patient data between multiple disparate HIS while ensuring patient data security and privacy by adopting a distributed framework for managing patient identity. Some of the healthcare challenges that blockchain
Interoperability
blockchain in healthcare today are at different maturity levels as far as interoperability of healthcare data is concerned. There are some organizations who are exploring use of FHIR, while several organizations are using the CDA standard for data exchange and some share data using HL7 2.X standard Varying data standards across organizations is another challenge which reduces which hamper Quality scores interoperability Blockchain helps overcome this challenge by accessing data through APIs. With transfer of data through APIs, blockchain achieves standardization of data format, which is used to transmit data irrespective of the capabilities of EHRs to communicate different HL7 versions.
Security
Security in healthcare industry encompasses various aspects based on integrity of data maintained in an organization. Tampering and security breach of healthcare data is a growing concern for new technology in healthcare. It is difficult to tamper with data present in blockchain as it requires validation from different nodes in the chain. Blockchain offers inbuilt security features as the data in blockchain is encrypted with private key of the sender and only intended recipient can decrypt data using key from the sender.