Why Blockchain Technology Matters In Healthcare?

3 min readApr 18, 2022

blockchain technology offers an opportunity to consolidate the fragmented healthcare industry in terms of information repository, clinical trials, drug development, medical records, and medical billing.

The big challenge in today’s healthcare systems is to make healthcare accessible, affordable and efficient to everyone (both current and potential). The old rules of economics don’t work here, which is why there has been a growing demand for blockchain technology.

Blockchain technology is not just a tool for financial transactions; it also has clear implications for the health sector. Adoption of blockchain technology by the healthcare industry needs to be approached with care, as it has the potential to disrupt almost every aspect of the business.

The healthcare sector is already facing some major challenges, particularly with the development and adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and electronic medical records (EMR). EHRs are being used widely in hospitals and clinics alike, but less so in day-to-day practice.

This problem is becoming more acute with regard to EMRs as well: many organizations have already adopted EMRs, but when patients start working with their own personal data, management about these data becomes more difficult. It makes sense that these are some of the most important people to engage in this discussion — our readership among companies that have demonstrated successful adoption include VMware, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, so they should be able to provide answers.

Blockchain and healthcare

The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value. Blockchain technology has the potential to break these sectors free from rent-seeking middlemen and monopolies, restoring power directly back to the users. Blockchain technology is not just a tool for financial transactions; it also has clear implications for the health sector. Adoption of blockchain technology by the healthcare industry needs to be approached with care, as it has the potential to disrupt almost every aspect of the business.

Blockchain technology is gaining more and more traction. With its potential to disrupt almost every aspect of the business, we believe that blockchain technology needs to be applied to healthcare with caution. Blockchain is generally accepted as having a great overall potential for the future of healthcare organizations and can help improve patient outcomes from clinical trials, through training hospital staff on clinical trials, to tracking medical records and improving the efficacy of drug supply chains. However, challenges still exist in the implementation of this technology within healthcare systems.

Blockchain technology offers an opportunity to consolidate the fragmented healthcare industry in terms of information repository, clinical trials, drug development, medical records, and medical billing. Blockchain technology is a great way to create a single version of the truth for health stats by enabling real-time access across the healthcare network sphere.

Impact of this solution to society

Healthcare is the largest provider of data to governments. The number of repositories of healthcare data in the world exceeds 7500. This is enough to store all the information required for an individual patient. In a recent study, these repositories were found to contain more than 250 million pieces of information that could be used by any government or private entity to obtain medical records and patient’s health condition and history. If this information was shared with the right parties, it would lead to countless opportunities for government and private sector companies like hospitals, doctors, insurance companies just to name a few.

As far as healthcare IT is concerned, there is no reason why it can’t benefit from digitization in different ways. It definitely has a place in improving security, but also in other ways:

Enabling the users to have access to their medical records in real time without having to wait for harried staffs
Improving speed (it saves time)
Changing how it operates from an administrative system into something closer to a personal health record management system (which can also be used for marketing purposes)