There are several benefits of Blockchain in the Healthcare Industry and also several reasons to implement this technology. As we all know the core characteristics of Blockchain is its decentralization. Which means each record is publicly recorded, time-stamped, and impossible to edit.
We can say that Blockchain in the Healthcare industry is to remove the middleman. So, in this post, we are going to discuss the various middlemen that can be remove and mistakes that can be avoided when the healthcare industry adopts Blockchain.
Pharma and Drugs
BlockChain is the technology that can truly revolutionize the pharmaceutical sector as well as drug discovery, development, and distributing process. According to the survey 9 out of 10 drugs fail to make it to a clinical trial, and the majority of them don’t reach the FDA approval stage. The biggest challenge for the pharma companies is getting crucial patient data in an era when they are not really trusted by people.
Here we are discussing few challenges that pharmaceutical companies are dealing with.
The disparity in Pharma Data
The most concerning data problem faced by the pharmaceutical companies, when it comes to drug development. Generally, the pharma data is often recorded and tucked away in silos, and this is accessed through different platforms. The worst case is each department often uses a separate data structure and model.
This is the area where Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, and Blockchain can work together to deliver the efficiency and accurate results pharma firms.
Data Analytics is Time consuming and resource Heavy
Pharma companies have to deal with so many data sources, so it is very obvious that they face problems in data gathering, handling, and eventually analytics. The second thing is that the whole process of gathering data from different sources can end up being time-consuming and sometimes lengthy analytics processes may fail to discover the important insights that might be helpful to the pharma.
So, it is clear that the whole data handling process for pharma companies need to shift because managing large data sets is already a quite challenge for both small and big pharmaceutical organizations.
Data insecurity and ambiguity around relevance
In the pharma firms, there is always ambiguity around the accuracy of available data. As we all know that pharma companies store data in silos which can be accessed through the different channels. That’s why it is hard for companies to ensure that all the available data is still fresh and insightful.
Blockchain technology can help the pharma companies to record, store, and sort their data in a way that it yields insights that are always relevant. More importantly, any solution that can help pharma accurately handle data will eventually save lots of money and improve the health results for everyone.
Here we are listing the ways on how Blockchain, alongside other robust technologies like AI and Big Data, can transform pharma:
Improve the Drug Supply Chain
Managing an effective health supply chain comes with an added risk and complexity for the pharma organizations because the compromised supply chain can have worse effects especially to health outcomes and patient safety.
Pharmaceutical companies can save approximately $200 billion to counterfeit drugs each year. By enabling the complete visibility and transparency throughout the drug supply chain. Blockchain allows tracking of drugs to their point of origin and thus, helps to eliminate falsified medication, reducing revenue loss by up to $43 billion annually for pharma companies.
Blockchain is the technology that is well suited for protecting every aspect of the healthcare distribution chain and there are several use cases that have already emerged on using this technology.
Manage and access drug trial data for research purposes
Managing and accessing drug trial data is the most complex issue in the healthcare industry. It always feels like a tradeoff between privacy and data sharing, which presents a huge platform for pharma.
The truth is most pharma companies keep their drug trial data in a centralized database which has to be compliant with HITRUST, ISO, HIPAA, and other ethical and regulatory requirements. The problem is that these centralized databases make it hard for the researchers and drug trial leaders to share the data with the right people.
Here the Blockchain comes into play, it helps pharma firms to create unalterable, auditable and distributed databases for storing and accessing drug trial.
Clinical trial bookkeeping
Keeping accurate medical trials is a tough business, staying on the top of accounting and costs during the clinical studies/trials, especially those that last for long periods. It is a well-known challenge to pharmaceutical companies.
Currently, available bookkeeping tools are too complicated and may fail sometimes to capture the insightful pictures of clinical trials. But the Blockchain technology can be implemented to keep track of clinical financial records as well as making bookkeeping efficient, accurate, and easy.
These are the benefits of implementing Blockchain Technology into pharmaceutical companies. If you want to know more about this reach Techugo.
