How Can Blockchain Improve Healthcare?

[o_e_l_e_o]

I've asked this a couple of times over the years in threads regarding EHRs and blockchain, and I've never been able to get a good answer:

EHRs are massive. Patients generate massive amount of data. Not just text entries from every doctor or other health professional they come in to contact with, but details about visits, insurance, prescriptions, test results, referrals, communications, etc. and crucially, scans - US, CT, MRI, PET, etc. Scans in particular take up massive amounts of data. The average patient will generate around 80 MB of data per year. Even a small hospital which serves a population of only 50,000 is going to generate on average 4 terabytes of data in a single year. Try scaling that up to a large hospital with several million patients and the numbers become ridiculous. How is that supposed to be stored on a blockchain?

The only potential solution I can see is to store it all on a centralized database as it currently is, and use blockchain to manage access policies to this centralized database. Sure, this is possible, but it is also completely pointless and holds no benefit over the current system.

[Pito001]

When people will finally understand that we dont need btc for the every industry? Sometimes SQL is just enough

[Kong Hey Pakboy]

I like the statement but the problem is the government mostly the health organization will doubt all of these because we all know that human records are one of the most important details that's why the records are only exclusive only to their company.

The objective is good to save the record through the blockchain but again there are a lot of people already skilled through makes data breaching we prevent that. I will seek more information and question about this statement because this is a good initiative too.

There is no such thing as a perfect technology that is 100% secured or can protect all of your sensitive data. So no guarantee using blockchain technology to save the medical record and for healthcare systems cannot be accessed by hackers without authorization because there are many great hackers nowadays.

[MCobian]

I think blockchain technology can improve healthcare, because blockchain technology is not only for the financial sector.
Some of the benefits that can be obtained if blockchain technology is applied to the health sector, among others, a good
tracking system to find out drug stocks, more transparent medical records and prevent accidental health care costs.
Therefore, several universities have included blockchain technology into the course, because blockchain technology is
beneficial for human life.

[deisik]

When people will finally understand that we dont need btc for the every industry? Sometimes SQL is just enough

This is not about btc (Bitcoin)

Obviously, you refer to blockchain and make it sound like blockchain should be used everywhere in any industry. This is not so. There are areas where it can be useful as well as areas where it will be useless. The point is, in many cases we can't figure that out until we actually try things with it

And healthcare is no exception. It is an extremely complex space, and you can be dead certain that it is horribly ineffective. I think the pandemic has shown this state of affairs abundantly clear, blockchain or otherwise. But it's also done a good thing in that it revealed these inefficiencies which can now be improved if there is a will and intention

[Yatsan]

Blockchain technology cannot improve healthcare in my opinion.
The Blockchain can be used to store data,but this is not the main problem of the healthcare systems around the world.The pharmaceutical giants and private hospitals,who are profit driven,have to be held responsible for many issues in the healthcare systems.
The US healthcare system is different than the EU healthcare systems,so I'm not familiar with all the Medicaid/health insurance funds in the US.In my country,the main problem is the corruption inside the hospitals and I know that this problem cannot be solved by simply implementing blockchain technology.

I agree. The records or stored data can be easily be manageable by making use of Blockchain technology but that was just a small chunk of the problem for the main problem is the healthcare system itself. The system or the way the health care is being distributed and implemented must be the one to be focused and further to make improvements. Such corruption and biases existing on healthcare facilities that is part of the whole healthcare system is really difficult to be manage and that must be the one to be fixed. Well, there are parts of the healthcare that can be improved by the blockchain technology but still that is just a shallow part of the problem. It will be good to implement such blockchain partnered into healthcare but still it doesn't resolve the problem as a whole.

[stompix]

The average patient will generate around 80 MB of data per year. Even a small hospital which serves a population of only 50,000 is going to generate on average 4 terabytes of data in a single year. Try scaling that up to a large hospital with several million patients and the numbers become ridiculous. How is that supposed to be stored on a blockchain?

Well, we can have one blockchain for a section per floor per hospital. 
And we're going to have CardioHeidelberg token, GastroPitieSalpetriere and so on

Storing it alone wouldn't be that big of a problem, the current system is doing just this at this point but the problem will be the so-called decentralization, how are you going to keep the nodes up, and most importantly who is going to pay for this. Current databases that are running in hospitals here (although not on that scale, as it would be impossible for a hospital around here to have millions of patients) are optimized for this, there are a few copies of the data in the health ministry storage but even with these tiny things there will be no real decentralization but rather giving custody to another entity.
Why do that? No reason!

Another problem I see in this concept is that as we know and use the blockchain everything is final, there is no chargeback there is no block deletion, what will happen in case of human error while handling the data? It's pretty sure they have a way of removing it, so, at this point, what's the point of an immutable blockchain?

The only potential solution I can see is to store it all on a centralized database as it currently is, and use blockchain to manage access policies to this centralized database. Sure, this is possible, but it is also completely pointless and holds no benefit over the current system.

In short, rely on a traditional database that can act like a blockchain as close as possible. And we already have tons.