Blockchain in healthcare represents the ability to expand the acquisition of health data from populations of people who are currently under-served by the medical community or who don’t participate in medical research.

Health researchers require vast amounts of data sets in order to advance the understanding of disease management, biomedical discovery, development of drugs and now design individual treatment plans based on say a person’s genetics, lifecycle or environment.

Blockchain data structures would work well for gathering data from wearable sensors and mobile applications, thus enabling information on the benefits of treatments as well as patient reported outcomes. If we were able to get access to EMR data and genomics this will offer increased capabilities to classify individuals into groups for specific treatments or understand disease management.

The real-time availability of mobile application and wearable sensor data from the blockchain would provide continuous, monitoring of high risk patients and drive the innovation of “smart” apps that could say notify caregivers and health providers if a patient reached a critical threshold for action. Care teams could reach out to the patient and coordinate treatment options for early intervention.

A health care blockchain would likely promote the development of a new breed of “smart” applications for health providers and patients that would mine the latest medical research and develop personalized treatment paths. The health provider and patient would have access to the same information and would be able to engage in a collaborative, educated discussion about the best-case treatment options based on research rather than intuition.

To conclude blockchain technology helps to address the problem of getting access to disparate systems of record in healthcare, it is based on open standards, provides a shared distributed view of health data and will achieve widespread acceptance and deployment throughout all industries.

At Rapid Healthcare we are exploring how our mobile apps can help contribute meaningful data to the Blockchain so that “smart” apps can utilize that information and provide meaningful care to providers, caregivers and patients. The acquisition, storage and sharing of this data would lay a scientific foundation for the advancement of medical research and precision medicine, help identify and develop new ways to treat and prevent disease and test whether or not mobile devices engage individuals more in their health care for improved health and disease prevention.

Source: Blockchain For Health Data and Its Potential Use in Health IT and Health Care Related Research