Smart Contract and Distributed Ledger for Healthcare Informatics
Yogesh Sharma, B. Balamurugan · 2022
From the past decade, information technologies have gained various new tech-nologies in the industries. One industry, unfortunately, was left behind or lagged, the healthcare sector. The reason could be a number of factors, like a couple of activities in healthcare or healthcare services and the utilization of charting paperbased information. If given a thought, every time a person goes to a doctor, there are questions about the last treatment, which are written down on charts, or in the hospital, nurses generally input things on charts and paper records, as well as the doctors. The problem with this is the collection of hundreds of records for every hundreds of patients over a 2-week period, and the result is a stack of charts. In analyzing a stack of written information, what you have is the possibility of illegible information, lost information, or just the inability to say what is in there. Now what is happening in the healthcare sector is the incorporation of new technologies that are digitizing this paper-based resource or information resource into computerized type of information. Now instead of writing this in the paper-based form, information is being input into the computer for creating electronic health records (EHR). This is where technologies, like distributed ledger and blockchain, comes into play. These technologies have gained a lot of appreciations in the past decade for safely handling a user's data and provide a strong privacy and security to the data of the users. The idea of distributed ledger helps the user's data to be shared with all the users of the data, be it a patient, doctor, and/or the administra-tor of the data.