BLOCKCHAIN: A PANACEA FOR MEDICAL DATA ACCESS AND MANAGEMENT
Robbie Abraham R, K Devaki, Rahul Krishnan K, Ranjith Kumar Manoharan · Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research · 2020
Healthcare is a data-intensive domain where a very large amount of data is created, disseminated, and accessed every day. For example, data is created when a patient is admitted in a hospital. The main objective is to make sure that this data related to the patients are available across every hospital. This ensures that the doctors have a better knowledge of the patient’s history of ailments and provide better treatment to the patients. Typically, healthcare providers are interconnected by means of the Health Information Systems (HIS) allowing them to exchange medical data. However, the size of current HIS is limited to a set of hospitals or a given region, and therefore the common practice is that patient-related medical data are not available for exchange. This causes a major setback in providing patients with efficient treatment. This is because the history of treatment the patient has undergone is unavailable to the doctor who is treating the patient for the day. This is a major problem persisting in this country. However, it is possible to overcome the problem. A comprehensive solution is provided to this problem by maintaining a common database. Blockchain is used to make sure that the data stored in the database is not tampered. As a result, hospitals can share data related to the patients with ease and provide better treatment to them.