The EU Blockchain Observatory published its fifth report under the headline “Blockchain Applications in the Healthcare Sector.” The document highlights the importance of distributed ledger technology for the European healthcare sector, which faces a number of challenges on its route to the “Healthcare 4.0” revolution. The 66-page document was announced on the EU Blockchain Observatory’s Twitter on Monday. Its authors take an optimistic perspective on the implementation of blockchain technology in healthcare, noting its compatibility with the core principles of “Healthcare 4.0”, such as interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, real-time capability, service orientation and modularity. Below are seven key takeaways from the report. As the healthcare industry becomes more knowledge-based, it gets more complex — the abundant variety of tools and methods also makes it prone to errors. Hence, having a flexible and digitized system of knowledge and data management is of crucial importance. Such a system should facilitate easy and user-friendly access for patients, whose interest in accessing their own health information grows rapidly. And, of course, there is an old problem that didn’t go away — the data stored in the current healthcare systems are often siloed. As the report goes, a properly designed healthcare application on a distributed ledger can alleviate many of these concerns. When talking about healthcare, some centralization is desired, but efficient centralization is hard to deliver. DLT thus becomes an almost inevitable solution. For example, as the report highlights, distributed ledgers could help monitor the use of medical equipment by healthcare facilities and identify thedeficiency or surplus of devices in different geographical locations, or to route patients to facilities that are best able to treat them. Perhaps one of the most widely recognized advantages of blockchain regarding healthcare is its ability to fight counterfeiting — traditionally a very sensitive problem for the industry — by tracking the data of every single item in the supply chain. The report once again confirms this feature, highlighting the logistical benefits as well:Amid epidemic outbursts like the one humanity has experienced recently, this ability could become crucial both for national and global healthcare systems. Human health is a key concern on which the broadest global collaboration possible can be expected. Here again, comes the blockchain technology with its ability to streamline the exchange of information on a massive scale. As with any other high-tech industry, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are the future of healthcare. Once consolidated, information on medical use cases from a multitude of organizations can be used to train machine learning algorithms:The report questions an argument that blockchain isn’t compatible with the necessary privacy of patients’ data because of the immutability of data recorded in distributed ledgers. According to the authors, the application of blockchain could be combined with an off-chain solution:Overall, the framers of the report encourage the European Commission to facilitate future legislation enabling innovation in health information technologies, including blockchain. They underline the DLT’s potential to be not just technological infrastructure, but a new way to govern data relationships and a conduit for economic development. A possible threat to blockchain-powered innovation could come from legislators who could stall the technology’s implementation by introducing overly conservative regulatory measures. Therefore, the report advocates for the regular review of regulations regarding their adequacy for the newest debates and developments around DLT:The European Blockchain Observatory is a European Commission initiative designed to facilitate blockchain innovation and spur the conversation on distributed ledger technology among European stakeholders.
All data is taken from the source: https://cointelegraph.com/
Article Link: https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchain-in-the-eu-healthcare-report-6-key-takeaways
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