oa New technologies - BlockChain as a Service (BCaaS) for healthcare

Background: The healthcare domain is undergoing a major shift towards electronic health records (EHR) and data management as illustrated by the global trend in Figure 1 with a shift over recent times from passive technology adopters towards more investigators and explorers. There is a vital need for a universal patient record in a distributed ledger and new approaches to ensure collaborative health when we can manage our own wellness outside of the system to improve outcomes and contain healthcare costs^1,2. There are a few immediate needs to address which are patient-centric management regarding high incidence chronic diseases and identification and optimization of at-risk parameters. Methods: This is an ideation for exploring “Blockchain” implementation to match the correct individual to their health data which is critical to their medical care. It is recognized that a significant proportion of EHR are not accurately matched within the same healthcare system³ and this hinders critical success factors such as effective patient management, patient satisfaction, and continuity of quality care (Figure 2). Results: The following outcomes and advantages are expected to be delivered for patient care records management offering transparent and verifiable records which are encrypted to provide streamlined clinical data flow benefitting patients. Core benefits also include enhancing transparency to patients, reducing threats of hacking, increasing patient records safety, eliminating workarounds, and minimizing IT expenditures and downtimes. Conclusion: As a promising breakthrough, this idea should result in patients no longer needing to perform the tedious task of gathering records from various providers. Instead patients would only need to provide access to their health blockchain, hence retaining control of their data and not spending time and energy keeping their data up to date1.