Using blockchain projects in healthcare

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The multibillion-dollar blockchain industry could not ignore such an item of expenditure of the nationaleconomies like health care and not offertheir solutions for optimizing information flows. Even at the stage of infrastructure development of blockchain technologies, in 2016, the US Department of Health and Human Services held an open competition on the use of blockchain technologies in healthcare. As a result, 15 winning documents were identified: they were very different in the methods of solving problems, but they very precisely coincided in the field of determining the applied problems of medical care for the population that could be solved with the help of new technology.

The very essence of blockchain transactions, allowinguse them as a system of secure trusted data warehouses - creating a data chain signed with keys selected on the basis of host consensus algorithms makes it possible to offer at least three solutions for the healthcare industry:

The first one is creation guaranteedprotected and at the same time public repositories of information about patients, their illnesses, treatment, medical records, taking medications, prescriptions and dispensing medicines for them - in short, all that information that constitutes medical secrets and can only be disclosed at the request of the patient. This is a blockchain-based storage of medical data. Their advantages are that they can be accessed at any time from anywhere in the world, and if the patient, his representative or his insurance company will have a decryption key, then the entire medical history, taking medications, and comments of specialists will turn out to be on the palm. This will allow to treat patients anywhere, using all the previous experience of their treatment, listed in an indestructible blockchain base.

The second solution is for the logistic task,associated with the tracking of medicines and medical devices. According to WHO data for 2018, the volumes of falsified and substandard drugs in the total pharmaceutical market are estimated at no less than 10%. In certain classes of drugs, according to the Ministry of Health, the counterfeit volumes reached 47%! Monitoring the production of all drugs from production to the pharmacy shelf will provide a guarantee of quality to the consumer, who will be able to independently verify the batch number, date of manufacture, and the period of sale of drugs, using the simplest blockchain reader for this platform on his smartphone. In addition, the falsification of drugs at the level of counterfeiting substances during production and the organization of “night shifts” at pharmaceutical enterprises will also become impossible due to the exact linking of batches of substances, technological maps and issued batches of drugs and their fixation on the blockchain. If ineffective or fake batches of drugs are discovered, the culprit can be determined almost instantly.

The third solution is procurement control andfree prescription drugs that fall under the program of providing patients with free medical care in the framework of compulsory medical insurance. Here, cross-cutting control is useful - from procurement to pharmacy vacation - to prevent corruption abuse of various types and the possibility of patient monitoring the availability of batches of drugs in the region’s pharmacies, which will reduce queues, lower costs of the compulsory medical insurance system and increase the availability of medicines for all categories of the population. In the United States, the legislator determines that by 2023 a unified network for the control of dispensing prescription drugs (not yet created) should operate throughout the country. The solution is to use one of the most advanced MediLedger blockchain project in this area.

“Control of the purchase of prescription drugs for“blockchain is a fresh global solution for healthcare,” comments Alexey Nasonov, CEO of the fintech company Worldcore, which acts as a consultant for several healthcare projects. – This is the first step towards the so-called personal supply of medicines, when pharmaceutical corporations produce an individual drug for each patient, labeling it accordingly and placing information about it on the blockchain so that the medicine reaches its consumer and only him. “In addition, do not forget about such a simple and non-specific use of blockchain as payment for services with tokens.”

Such tasks - of the third kind can be solved directlyNow, without adjustments to the legislative framework, since there is no need to observe medical confidentiality. Therefore, for example, in Russia, one of the pilot projects in the field of blockchain control of the origin and destination of drugs was launched on the basis of the Novgorod Regional Clinical Hospital, implemented by the blockchain segment of the St. Petersburg United Medical Corporation company. As part of the first stage of the pilot project, an electronic access system is being implemented for each patient, so that he will be able to track the personal prescription of medicines, their availability under the program of preferential provision. For the hospital, it is envisaged to monitor the expenditure of medicines, automatically generate a financial card for the patient to report to the CHI. The end of the first stage of the project is the end of 2018. Base - smart contracts of the ERC20 standard in the Ethereum blockchain.

By 2018, the number of projects in the field ofhealthcare has grown many times: from DentaCoin, offering tokens for paying for dentists' services, and cannabisfarm.io, which provides home-friendly products for growers from the name, to quite global ones - MediLedger, which solves the problems of global drug tracking, Patientory, Medicalchain, MEDIS, which provide global access to the patient database.

“Development of the healthcare sector in the futurewill lead to the personalization of medical care, including the development of personal medicines based on the genetic map and the patient’s well-being,” sums up Alexey Nasonov. – IBM Watson is already making diagnoses better than any doctor. If we transfer local databases of medical centers into a blockchain format accessible to the whole world, this will create a revolution in healthcare comparable to the big data revolution.”

In other words, the healthcare blockchain industryprojects is developing, and the emergence of many projects that find their crowd-investors, means that people care about their health, they are ready to invest money in it, and this process will never stop.