PRIVACY PRESERVATION OF HEALTH RECORDS USING BLOCKCHAINTECHNOLOGY
Abstract
New technology and innovation have always been a top priority in any organization.
Several organizations and industries are in search of new technology which will improve
the efficiency as well as growth of an organization. For this, artificial intelligence was
focused, but still severity and privacy were compromised. Therefore, to improve the
security and privacy of data within an organization and to improve the performance,
blockchain technology has emerged. Blockchain is a way of storing and sharing data in
a way that is distributed, transparent and temper proof. Blockchain technology has
allowed the solution to rapidly scale and to adapt to perform multiple tasks across
industries. It provides distinct innovative ways which will boost the economic growth,
reduced cost and time, with enormous benefits and progress in several domains.
Blockchain can be very useful in healthcare industry. Healthcare generates an enormous
amount of data which include laboratory test reports, imaging tests such as Xrays,
CTScans, financial documents, previous medications given to the patients, previous
medical history and last appointments. So, several patients under healthcare center,
constitutes a vast amount of data which is expanding at a very high speed.
In recent studies, in 2012, a report of The Institute of Medicine (IOM), titled “Best case
at cover cost: the path to continuously learning healthcare in America” stated that
American’s healthcare system has become far too complex and costly to continue
business as usual. It has several inadequacies and incapability to achieve quick and deep
clinical knowledge which hampers all improvements needed in patients care and safety.
Also, medical data is scattered throughout various medical institutions and data standards
are not uniform, resulting in low level of interoperability of medical data. Under these
circumstances, there is no assurance of the integrity and reliability of patient’s data. The
huge medical data is susceptible to data loss, data security, personal privacy leaks and
other issues. Therefore, to overcome challenges and to make healthcare data more private
and secure, blockchain technology is used. This ensures integrity of data and is also
helpful in distribution of healthcare data among several nodes in a network.