Highlights
- The current state of health data management cannot keep up in an era that excels in managing information at an unprecedented rate.
- Devising an efficient yet cost-effective health data management approach isn't just limited to deployment, but also requires gradual upgrades.
- Like any other business strategy, successful interoperability must also be planned around the goals and objectives of healthcare projects.
In this article
Innovation
The healthcare space has unlocked the power of blockchain
Even EHRs are relics of the past, now that blockchain has enabled interoperability. Here's how the healthcare space has unlocked the power of blockchain.
The negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is still evident and has upended major industrial sectors. However, if there's one industry that has emerged as the strongest, it's undoubtedly healthcare! Here are some numbers to back this claim. One recent survey published on Statista predicts that 55% of healthcare applications will have adopted blockchain for commercial deployment by 2025. What's more interesting is that a fifth of CXOs in the US stated that some form of blockchain or DLT has already been deployed in their respective healthcare organization.
Current State
Establishing efficient interoperability in healthcare
The current state of health data management cannot keep up in an era that excels in managing information at an unprecedented rate. The parallel shift to interoperability has also been experiencing exponential growth. It covers patient admission, diagnostic reports, prescriptions, online interaction between patients and experts, certificates, and reports. The back-end side of this hyper-converged infrastructure handles even more. As this data continues to grow, Healthcare Information Exchanges (HIEs) will require an equally augmented interoperability.
Let's jot down a few common pain points of HIEs and how blockchain can establish efficient interoperability and enable a healthcare system that is more efficient, disintermediated, and secure:
Planning and Strategy
Devising an Effective Health Data Management Strategy
As modern IT infrastructure can quickly turn into legacy systems depending on its performance, devising an efficient yet cost-effective health data management approach isn't just limited to deployment, but also requires gradual upgrades. Proper planning and paving out each step is crucial for your operation to benefit from blockchain applications. Like any other business strategy, successful interoperability must also be planned around the goals and objectives of healthcare projects. Let's now look at the crucial steps to achieve this:
Stage 1: Analyze Your Current IT Approach
The foremost concern in devising interoperability will be analyzing the efficiency of current IT infrastructures. Over the past decade, IT infrastructures have been growing in quite an unplanned way. Therefore, designing an efficient hyper-converged infrastructure with connected servers will further strengthen manageability that adopts changes.
Stage 2: Predict and Prepare for the Future
The initial deployment stage is where significant thoughts have to be put forward, not just for the operating sector but also for how it might perform in the coming decade. While preparing to adopt interoperability, it's better to ask;
- What does the future of this sector look like?
- Are you part of an industry that can instantly adopt this model?
- What technological advancements must be embraced today?
Stage 3: Explore the Possibility and Set Your Target
Now that you have assessed your current IT approach and predicted what's there for your organization, it's time to learn the possibilities and explore what blockchain can offer. The planning stage is vital when you should spend your time understanding the landscape, its problems, and possible solutions with the help of blockchain technologies.
Stage 4: Create an Efficient Interoperability in Healthcare
It's always better to start with your organization's expertise and first collaborate with your best partners, suppliers, and customers. It's possible to devise governance policies to tackle ongoing challenges and redesign how you implement efficient blockchain interoperability in healthcare.
Stage 5: Plan for an Operational Integration
The first step can be attributed to offering controlled access to public healthcare facilities to prototype applications, followed by implementing SaaS models that streamline the way different teams operate. Whatever you choose, think of blockchain interoperability as an evolving set of efforts that can leverage and support all healthcare services.
Trustless collaboration
Blockchain creates unique solutions through its distributed, decentralized, and immutable nature
Whether reducing complexity or enabling trustless collaboration, blockchain creates unique solutions through its distributed, decentralized, and immutable nature. And health data management is one of those rapidly developing areas that has considered convening blockchain into its ecosystem. With the healthcare cloud computing market projected to reach 65 billion USD by 2025 at an impressive CAGR of 18%, the interoperability in the healthcare space can be attributed to critical factors that have increased awareness and adoption of blockchain-based HCIT solutions.
