The company Asseco Spain pointed out some benefits that the implementation of block chain technology (blockchain) applied in the health sector can bring. This was shared with Cointelegraph in Spanish in an analysis.

Thank you for reading this post, don’t forget to subscribe!

The digitization of the healthcare sector has already begun, but it still has a long way to go. In this sense, the implementation of technologies such as “Big Data” or Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be key to promoting ecosystems that allow saving costs of daily management. “In this sense, Europe calculates that the digitization of Health will generate millions of benefits per year in 2030,” they announce in the analysis.

“To the increase in the use of telemedicine and the availability of digital services is added a key pillar, cybersecurity. This last point is crucial since safeguarding confidential patient data, as well as having critical information and recovering it in case of theft, are the key points to guarantee the daily activity of any hospital or health center. The digitization of the health system would allow a faster and more personalized response to patients, as well as achieving greater efficiency and interoperability in the use of the health system between the different Regional Health Systems of the Autonomous Communities“, explained Asseco. Spain.

The large volume of data and information present in the health sector makes blockchain a transcendental technology, since it can streamline this type of process and would provide daily cost savings.

To talk about blockchain it is necessary to understand what DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) is.

Distributed Ledger Technology

This technology is a data structure hosted on various computing devices distributed in different locations and regions. While this distributed ledger technology existed long before Bitcoin, cryptocurrency helped advance DLT by bringing together different technologies such as transaction marking, Peer to Peer (P2P) networks, cryptography, shared computing power, and the consensus algorithm. In short, the components that make up a DLT are:

A data model that captures the current state of the ledger (A transaction language that changes the state of the ledger). A protocol used to build consensus among participants about which transactions will be accepted and in what order by the ledger.

Benefits of the application of Blockchain in the health sector:
Traceability of prescription drugs
The application of blockchain to supply chains could guarantee the immutability of drugs, avoiding alterations or falsifications during the different phases of the chain.

clinical trials
Blockchain offers a transparent and immutable data record of clinical trials. A platform that uses this technology to store clinical trial data would make it easier for researchers and regulators to access and verify the data, improving the quality and reliability of the results.

Protection of confidential and personal information
Blockchain allows data to be altered from multiple gateways, which might seem insecure at first, but blockchain is designed to mitigate this risk. All blocks are connected to each other by unique signatures. If you want to enter more information in a block, this block is not altered, but a new one is created where we can see what information and when it has been updated.

Telemedicine, document management and personalization
Blockchain opens the door to a large number of options to personalize medical care and treatment.The same is true of patient genomic data, which is securely stored and shared among medical professionals, individualizing treatments and making more efficient use of them. Access to medical records is another of the contributions of this technology to the health sector, since it allows both patients and professionals to access personal and medical information, thus giving them more control over it.