Here’s How Blockchain Can Revolutionize Telemedicine

Here’s How Blockchain Can
Revolutionize Telemedicine
By Matt Doyle

Could blockchain offer the boost telemedicine needs to
reach its potential? Over the past several decades,
digitally-facilitated medicine has made signiﬁcant inroads
into mainstream medicine, expanding access to care,
improving health outcomes, and lowering costs for patients
and providers alike — and yet, adoption is far lower than it
should be. According to one study conducted by HIMSS
Analytics, the percentage of providers who offer
telemedicine solutions hovers at just 71%. Similarly, a
2018 Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) report found the
adoption rate for payers to be even less, with only 67% of
surveyed employers reporting telemedicine coverage in
their largest-enrollment health plans.
The health sector’s enthusiasm for digitally-facilitated
health solutions is at an unmistakable ebb — but why?
There are several reasons; providers face regulatory
barriers, unclear reimbursement schemes, legal
uncertainties, and, perhaps most signiﬁcantly, privacy
concerns.

The Security Risks of Telemedicine
In an era where hacks are well-publicized and relatively common, provider concerns about privacy risks are as
understandable as they are widespread. One survey from Deloitte reported that a third of polled physicians cited concerns
over the security and privacy of patient information as the primary reasons preventing them from bringing telemedicine
into their daily practice.
Moreover, even if providers do overcome their concerns and integrate telemedicine, facilitating digital care can be both
difﬁcult and costly, given the complications inherent to providing HIPAA-compliant and privacy-protected telehealth
services. While HIPAA provides deﬁnitions for what constitutes a secure line of communication between doctors and
patients, bad actors can exploit vulnerabilities outside of conventional transmissions and digitally-facilitated conversations.
Consider the case of a senior who uses an IoT-powered device to call for help in the event of a fall. The sensors the tool
uses are ostensibly meant to detect potential safety risks or medical emergencies. However, they could also inadvertently
transmit sensitive information about her daily routine that malicious players could take advantage of, such as when her
house is empty. In another less-pressing but still worrisome example, routine data transmissions from apps or common
medical devices such as insulin pumps could provide users’ information to third-party advertisers without explicit
permission.
As one researcher sums up in an article for the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, “Health care systems that
combine patient-reported information and objective data from telehealth devices and sensors can be used to create
patient-centered, personalized health interventions. Although these new technologies promise to improve the quality of
care, reduce costs, and increase patient satisfaction, they raise a number of ethical issues.”
Blockchain, however, may just resolve those issues.

Blockchain: A Secure Lock on Medical
Data?
While blockchain cannot patch all of the vulnerabilities associated with digitally-facilitated
care, it has the potential to alleviate some of the privacy concerns that currently prevent
providers from wholly adopting telemedicine. With a blockchain-secured system, new
information must be approved by both a patient and their doctor, then checked against a
previous ledger. No single person has control over the data; instead, each authorized user can
secure a personal copy of the shared record. The increased security gives providers greater
peace of mind and allows them to have more conﬁdence in their digitally-facilitated health
protocols.
Moreover, blockchain’s potential extends beyond simply securing data. A few researchers at
the University of Manchester’s Academic Health Science Centre believe that, given time,
blockchain could provide patients the means to better understand their health and manage
their care through the use of Personal Health Records.

As the scientists wrote in an article for Frontiers in Medicine earlier this
year, “Personal Health Records (PHRs) have the potential to give patients
fine-grained, personalized and secure access to their own medical data and
to enable self-management of care […] Ledger of Me is based on around the
principle that this combination of event-driven smart contracts, medical
record data, and patient control is important for the adoption of
blockchain-based solutions for the PHR.”
The researchers further explain that they intend their blockchain-supported
framework to not only give patients more control over their data and care
but also to “provide a strong consent mechanism for sharing of data
between different organizations and apps.”
Given that data-sharing across systems is notoriously difficult in healthcare,
such a flexible, communicative approach could be invaluable. When
integrated into telemedicine, blockchain has the potential to both provide
needed security and reassurance to breach-aware care providers, as well
as allow for more productive data-sharing between a patient’s doctors and
medical apps.
Blockchain is a clear — if preliminary — solution to the problems
telemedicine currently faces. Widespread integration of the technology can
stimulate faith in and adoption of telemedicine, bringing cost-saving and
care-quality benefits to providers and patients alike.

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Here’s How Blockchain Can Revolutionize Telemedicine

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