Relevant subjects in the health industry do not receive enough funding because they do not benefit pharmaceutical laboratories. Blockchain allows crowd-funding of research related to health, thus decoupling finance from the interests of businesses and linking it to social needs. Blockchains like Ethereum, especially smart contract-enabled blockchains, allow “tokens” to be created. Tokens can be considered new digital currencies, with high flexibility in choosing their rules. Such tokens can be sold for other tokens on the blockchain platform, creating a token economy. The funds are held under an intelligent contract, the rules governing the spending of this money are laid down, and the intelligent contract is self-imposed. For more information, you can visit bitcoin wallet.
Challenges Faced by Healthcare
Due to unsafe data sharing and siloed medical record handling, patients waste time and money, such as repeated blood checks or physical examinations, obtaining unnecessary medical services. The patient’s medical records are not fully accessed by emergency personnel, doctors, and other healthcare providers. For example, they do not usually receive accurate health reports detailing medication reactions, previous or non-existent medical issues, controlled drug consumption, etc. The risk may be that the diagnosis or treatment is inadequate. False drugs are made risky by mutation or illegally active ingredients. These concerns can jeopardize treatment’s health and efficacy or contribute to addiction and drug dependency—these bear opportunities for unintended, fatal side-effects.
Advantages of Smart Contract and Ethereum
Decentralized Ledger
Digitalization could help transform the existing centralized ecosystems of health care into a fully interoperable system through a partially centralized and decentralized system. In the transformation phase, the operability of the medical system could be guaranteed. In the transformation, process profit could be invested directly. Decentralized IT systems can leverage national and global patient-centered care. Patients can access data supported by intelligent contracts and own their health information on these systems. The technologies to perform licenses and identifying are provided by a decentralized integrated DLT with intelligent contracts. Many countries have launched their initiatives at the national level for the digitalization of their ecosystems.
EHR: More Authority to Patient
In two critical ways, the health records of patients are very valuable. First, its structure and content can make a diagnosis or break it, and it is essential for a patient not to administer any substances. Secondly, external actors may use patient health data for marketing purposes or even for malicious purposes, so the protection of this data is important. As soon as data has been transmitted to an actor, no guarantee can be made that this data is neither transmitted nor copied. However, patients can require players and institutions to remove their data once they have fulfilled the original purpose of receiving them. If the institution does not use the data with the patient’s permission, the signature may be exhibited before the court. The data may be contaminated, also called watermarking, in a recognizable way to be traced back to the culprit.
Integrity
An estimated annual loss of $ 200 billion for counterfeit drugs is estimated for integrity pharmaceutical companies. It is possible to trace drugs throughout your life cycle with blockchain and Smart Contracts. The geographical information and other relevant information must be included and tracked for each ingredient and substance. The blockchain ensures that this information cannot be compromised or deleted; it gives us the so-called non-reputability cryptographic property: once a drug is tracked and recordable, a malicious actor is not allowed to disappear without getting picked.
Patient Management Consent
Blockchain technologies allow for structured data possession over Ethereum-based layers of privacy and permission. Feedback from doctors on their accounts couldn’t be altered or removed by the patients. They can monitor exposure through full or partial visibility to different actors in the ecosystem of healthcare. The patients may, for example, share their complete reports with a doctor. But it is only with academic research companies or healthcare organizations that they prefer to share unspecified papers.
Drug Traceability
The ability of blockchain to maintain good communication in the supply chain helps trace the drugs and their usage throughout the healthcare system. It has become transparent and efficient more than ever. Then the root point to the final user can be traced.