The distributed ledger technology that underpins the digital currency Bitcoin, known as the blockchain, has sprung into public consciousness. A blockchain, at its most basic level, is a constantly increasing collection of electronic records, with each block unit comprising a timestamp, information about the preceding block in the chain, and data. As a result, the blockchain design is immune to data or provenance alteration. Fintech companies rapidly saw blockchain’s promise, and it’s currently being used in a variety of domains, including financial transactions and service/product life cycles.
In the healthcare and life science industry, blockchain technology has the potential to improve cross-industry partnerships, integrity, and trust built on consensus, interoperability, tracing, and tracking of tangible and intangible entities. You can visit for crypto processing.
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So, what is blockchain?
A blockchain is a decentralized or shared database or ledger that keeps track of transactions that have been verified by a peer-to-peer network. The list of validated transactions in Bitcoin, for example, is made up of payment instructions that have been verified by the network. The peers in a peer-to-peer network are referred to as “nodes” quite frequently. Computers that have downloaded and installed the necessary blockchain software are known as nodes. Each node connects to other nodes in the relevant blockchain network over the internet once the software has been successfully implemented.
The blockchain network is a collection of connected nodes. Once connected, each node downloads and stores a copy of the database (hence why it’s called a distributed or shared database because every node has a copy) and can perform other tasks like sending transactions to be recorded on the blockchain.
There is no such thing as a single blockchain network, just as there is no such thing as a single database or network. There are a variety of blockchain networks that can be used to solve various problems.
What role does blockchain play in the life sciences industry?
Blockchain technologies can help the life sciences and healthcare industries in a variety of ways, including:
- Electronic health records (EHRs) – EHRs could be securely operated on a blockchain, protecting patient data and privacy while allowing doctors to access their patient’s medical histories and researchers to use shared data to further scientific research.
Permission layers can be built into the system using blockchain solutions. While patients cannot change or delete medical information added to their profiles by doctors, they can control access by granting full or partial visibility to various stakeholders. Patients could, for example, give doctors complete access to their medical records but only share anonymized (or non-identifiable) medical information with pharmaceutical companies and other researchers. This structure is best suited to a private blockchain network, as previously stated.
- Supply chain – Pharmaceutical companies place a premium on supply chain integrity. Where the ingredients were made, where the drug was made, and how the medicine was handled throughout the supply chain, from start to finish, all the way to the patient, blockchain can keep a tab of it.
Blockchain solutions may also aid in more closely monitoring the unique supply chain required for new personalized medicines, such as CAR T-cell therapy (or CAR T-cell therapy). This treatment involves injecting new proteins into a patient’s own immune cells, which are then returned to the body. As more personalized medicines become available, accurately tracking a unique patient-specific supply chain will become increasingly important.
- Payments based on value – Many diseases have treatments that require treatment regularly (e.g., taking medicines daily), which requires health care providers to pay fees regularly. However, certain new treatments, such as gene therapies, are increasingly involving one-time, expensive treatments, with some treatments costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds.
Given tight healthcare budgets, governments and insurers are finding it more difficult to cover the entire cost of these new but costly therapies upfront. Blockchain technologies might be part of a system that connects payment to therapeutic outcomes. For example, if the patient’s clinical results meet specific minimal levels after treatment, a monthly payment might be made to the pharmaceutical manufacturer. In certain circumstances, the monitoring necessary to complete this task might be done remotely using wearable devices.
- Clinical trial data collection — Pharmaceutical firms have already begun to gather clinical trial data using blockchain technologies, which offers a lot of advantages. For example, once data is put to the blockchain, it is extremely difficult for researchers to modify the results without causing other stakeholders to notice the change. It is for this reason why blockchains are said to as unchangeable. As a result, after analyzing their study findings, researchers find it incredibly difficult to revise their initial clinical trial hypothesis. This method is often frowned upon since it frequently leads to false positives (i.e. the test results incorrectly indicate the presence of a disease).
Data collected on a blockchain, along with other technologies such as data analytics and wearable technology, is allowing researchers to acquire more medical data from patients in real-time. Patients may profit from this since the uploaded medical data may be analyzed in real-time – using AI – to more precisely detect possible diseases that a patient is suffering from or is at risk of developing in the future.
- Patient-centric usage-There are a number of potential patient-centered effects of blockchain technology in healthcare. One early use case demonstrates how ‘smart contracts’ (self-executing contracts built on the blockchain) can be used to manage patient consent and health record ownership across data silos seamlessly and securely. There are also deployments in personalized medicine, prescription medicine management, patient claims and billings management, data security for wearables and other IoT medical devices, and data security for wearables and other IoT medical devices.
Wrapping Up:
The use of blockchain in the life sciences is gaining steam, and experts say the biggest barrier to adoption is non-technical and non-regulatory. It is more about persuading private, public, and governmental leaders to accept blockchain technology. They do, however, predict that blockchain will be implemented in the healthcare sector in the near future.
Given the significance of data integrity to their business models, whether it’s electronic health records (or EHRs), clinical trial data, or information on the pharmaceutical supply chain, the life sciences and healthcare industries are in a perfect position to make use of the benefits of block chain for these sorts of specialized initiatives.