How Blockchain Technology Can Change Telemedicine

In very simple words, we can say that a Blockchain is a distributed ledger system where data blocks add after one another in a peer-to-peer network in chronological order. Each data block contains digital information with a proper timestamp.

In the current modern times, with the recent advancement of technology, the healthcare sector is gradually gravitating towards the use of the latest technologies and software. Out of those, one is blockchain technology in telemedicine.

The term Telemedicine basically refers to the healthcare services that are remotely delivered by electronic systems for consultation and assessments. Healthcare practitioners use telemedicine for evaluating, diagnosing, and treating patients in a better way without letting them make any physical visits to healthcare centers.

Regardless of the ease of telemedicine, this new technology in the healthcare industry increases concerns about privacy and security. If the internet-enabled connection between doctor and patient is insecure, then it's a possibility that the hackers and cybercriminals can get to patients' location data, personal information, banking details, and many others.

As a result, we can conclude that the privacy issues in telemedicine mostly due to the absence of world-class security and privacy controls. But, this problem can be solved by the use of blockchain technology in-home telehealth services.

That's why in this article, we will tell you how blockchain technology can change telemedicine services. Let's start:

Important Benefits of Blockchain in Telemedicine!

Blockchain innovation stores medical care related tasks, for example, clinical records, following medication and drugs, and that's just the beginning. In fact, the blockchain framework is secured such that the information can be stored, shared, but can't be edited.

This permits suppliers to keep a detailed information base of patient data.

Three significant characteristics of blockchain for telemedecine are decentralization, cloud security, and immutability. These three things fascinate the use cases of blockchain in the medicare industry.

One territory that could enormously profit from blockchain innovation is telemedicine. This is generally a new field that is giving far off conveyance to medical care and medical institutes administrations over virtual communications.

It is very clear that the healthcare services data is getting enormous day by day! To verify each and every service, you need a secured network system. And blockchain as a telemedecine platform offers you better things.

Some of the top benefits of blockchain in telemedicine;

• First, blockchain offers you the best security and facility to record information online. That means blockchain will easily store every patient’s data, health-related information, transaction details, treatments, procedures, tests, and lab results at both ends, i.e., user-end and healthcare service provider end.
• Once you use blockchain technology, you can also keep track of the medical history of any patient by making it more secure, efficient, and transferable.
• Blockchain is a link that connects digital data blocks. In case if any one block tampers, all the blocks will tamper. But that’s not the case blockchain guarantees you the best security practice and protect all the health-related information. Also, if someone tries to do any cybercrime, it will be easily detected. Thus, the telemedicine data will be always stored securely to avoid detection.
• Blockchain helps with the legalities because it is immutable and ensures you the options to make claims accurately. Also, with blockchain in telemedicine, you get the chance to catch fraud and patients claims. Furthermore, it helps in easy and secure transactions by properly coordinating between payers, providers, government systems, and banks
• Blockchain also offers greater transparency by allowing all the healthcare systems, doctors, physicians, medical staff, patients, patients’ caretakers, insurance companies, etc. to connect together.

Though blockchain is a boon for telemedicine, it has many obstacles too in telemedicine. Some of them are discussed below:

Obstacles of Blockchain for Telemedicine

The telemedicine healthcare services were created in an offer to give more effective consideration at a lesser expense. The innovation now permits the patients and doctors to spare time by giving them an occasion to deal with minor and non-pressing issues distantly.

While the innovation is yet to develop into an industry standard, a few states over the USA are passing guidelines to encourage telemedicine in the critical times of Coronavirus COVID-19.

Some of the top obstructions that prevent the use of blockchain in telemedicine are cost, absence of the best information to execute it in a better way, and the absence of normalization.

The expense of blockchain technology at every medical level and stretching it to bring down all its interests at every medicare level is a tough task and needs lots of money because blockchain works on computational power and it needs a lot of electricity. As a result, it is expansive.

One of the most done criticisms of telemedicine is actually based on protection imperatives, security, and safety of the data. A critical number of patients and systems are now worried about the protection and security of their information.

With a few prominent releases and hacks on clinical records, clients have developed a mistrust over these new telemedecine health services due to which they choose the old pen-paper based medical care system. In general, this doubt has hampered the utilization and take-up of telemedicine applications.

With the coming of blockchain in the healthcare industry, one thing is quite sure that telemedicine will appear to be secure, safe, and patients will start adopting it sooner. The utilization of blockchain in telemedicine will help in expanding buyer certainty and trust in the healthcare network.

"Two Top Telemedicine Platforms: Myclinic.com and MDsquare."

Conclusion

As time will fly, the healthcare sector will face the shortcomings of different resources and personnel. It will result in new challenges to provide medical care to everyone in less amount.

Telemedecine is one such demonstration at nascent stages and blockchain is significantly becoming potential for the industry. As a result, this will be the ultimate solution for the rest coming years.

It is clear and sure that companies and individuals are always ready to use the technologies and the telemedecine will become common too in the coming years.

Author Bio

James Burns is the Founder & CEO of CMS Website Services, a globally software and web development company in USA. With 10+ years of experience in designing, and development he has all solutions to your IT problems as a tech-business person.