Blockchain technology has been heavily involved in many industries and healthcare services have benefited a lot from it, too. According to GMInsights, the blockchain technology market in healthcare reached more than $280 million in 2020.
In this article, we will see how blockchain can effectively support healthcare technologies and how it can help with data storage.
Benefits of blockchain
But which are the benefits of using blockchain in healthcare? Well, some of the benefits of blockchain are the classic ones. Let’s see which they are.
Security
Blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, is now used by many industries in their operations, including supply chain management and financial services. This digital ledger can make all kinds of processes more efficient. For example, it replaces traditional bank transactions with safe peer-to-peer money transfers.
Transparency of data
Blockchain technology is a transparent, distributed ledger that can efficiently record transactions between two parties. Each participant within the system sees only their own specific transactions — information about other users’ activity remains hidden from them to protect privacy. Blockchain technology means businesses don’t have to worry about double accounting or tampering of data, because all records are entered in real time and cannot be altered by anyone on the network.
Faster speeds
No matter the industry, blockchain can help business-to-business transactions become more efficient. Paperwork and physical documentation are time-consuming and prone to error, which is where blockchain really shines — it reduces the need for third parties, streamlines transactions, and eliminates errors which can cost lives in the healthcare industry.
Substance Use Disorder is a disease that affects millions of people. This disease affects the brain and behavior of a person and causes them to consume drugs without any control. These drugs can range between legal and illegal drugs and can lie on different levels of being addictive and dangerous.
The most important thing to understand about Substance Use Disorder, as well as addiction, is that it is a disease, and a person – once hooked – does not have the control to stop doing drugs or consuming alcohol. However, the disease is manageable, and through proper care and support, an addict can start their journey towards recovery. If you or someone you know is battling substance abuse, you should find out what substance use treatment entails and how to get the help you or your loved one needs.
Of course, technology helps when it comes to understanding the disorder and suggested treatment methods. Technology has made it easier to do research and keep oneself up to date with different studies being carried out, their results, recommended interventions, and even information on treatment centers, wherever you may be in the world. However that is not all technology can be used for when it comes to treating substance use disorder through technology.
Analysts expect the nursing shortage to continue and even intensify in the next 12 months, cementing workforce challenges as a core concern for health system leaders.
Many are beginning to re-examine nurses’ workloads to find better, more efficient ways for them to stay focused on quality patient care while still managing their non-care related tasks.
One key area of focus is helping nurses spend less time trapped at a computer. Documentation is one of the biggest drivers of screen time, taking up as much as 25% of a nurse’s working day and limiting the time they can spend on direct patient care as they update records, complete flowsheets, and review Electronic Health Record (EHR) charts. With nurses’ time at a premium and no option to reduce the amount of comprehensive documentation required for effective, compliant care, here’s how health systems can use technology to relieve some of that burden.
Giving Nurses More Time to Provide Care
Current documentation processes often take nurses away from patient care to a workstation, where they have to navigate electronic medical records (EMRs) and other systems to input patient data. With so much of their attention directed at the computer, it can be difficult for nurses to maintain that all-important patient connection.
But documentation no longer needs to be this complex or time-consuming. The latest advances in AI, clinical intelligence, and natural language understanding allow nurses to capture the entire patient story using their voice—whether they’re with patients, on the go, or at the nurse’s station.
For example, speech recognition can help nurses complete both structured flow sheets and unstructured notes using speech-to-text. We’ve already seen significant progress for physicians using voice technology, especially within EMRs, and it would be easy to replicate with nurses. With the right solution, nurses can dictate at their workstation or using a mobile device, also cutting down on the extra workload of “double documentation” where hand-written notes taken during patient face time need to be transcribed at the computer.
By Humza Khan, founder and chief executive officer, HealthIV.
It seems impossible that just two years ago, telehealth apps were in their infancy, their growth in the medical sector stunted by the then-widely held belief — by doctors, patients, and insurance companies — that a doctor’s visit had to actually be held in a doctor’s office.
Like so many other sectors, COVID-19 upended healthcare, forever changing the way we think about meaningful, responsive, and affordable access. In the U.S. alone, telehealth visits increased from 840,000 in 2019 to 52.7 million in 2020. Those numbers have waned as we’ve all sought out the vestiges of a past normal, but healthcare will never be the same. Telehealth isn’t just “here to stay.” It’s the future of healthcare. Period.
Telehealth isn’t just about convenience. It’s about equity.
It’s a Tuesday, and you’ve taken a paid half-day off work to go to the doctor, an appointment you made six months ago. You hop in the car at 6:45 a.m. and make the hour crawl in traffic to the medical office or hospital where you park on the top level of a 10-story parking garage.
You see the doctor, who writes a prescription order, and after heading out to your car, you drive over to the pharmacy to talk to the pharmacist and pickup your new prescription. Like the other patients you see in the building, you’re frustrated by scheduling issues, drive time, parking, and the fact you sit in the waiting room for two hours to see a doctor for only 15 minutes.
Traditionally, the above scenario and its associated inconveniences have been the drivers for change in healthcare, and those changes have been aimed at solving problems like parking, check-in, and in-office wait times, which all primarily benefit patients who already have access to healthcare. Better parking structures, valet parking services, online check-in, and being moved from the waiting room after just 35 minutes instead of 45 minutes are all good solutions for handling patient frustrations towards inconvenience.
But these types of changes don’t often offer significant benefits to the 31 million Americans who lack health insurance and rely mostly on a too-small number of free clinics, the 72.5 million who don’t have access to a vehicle and are at the mercy of strained public transportation systems, or the 79 million who don’t have paid time off work to spend a full day on buses and in doctor’s offices.
Done right, telehealth can do more than provide equitable access to healthcare. It can empower patients.
Telehealth busted onto the healthcare scene as a means of providing medical care while reducing COVID-19 exposure risks. Despite early challenges for broad use across all population groups, it has continued to remain, and increase in importance as, a tool for equitable access. The balance that comes from telehealth has recently been in question as mandatory insurance coverage for telehealth visits expires 151 days after the end of the public health emergency (PHE). The PHE is currently expected to expire in mid-July 2022 but has been extended several times. Meanwhile, advocates continue to fight for the permanent expansion and retention of telehealth as a basic health service.
Telehealth as a basic service seems like a novel idea. But the core of telehealth is to provide equitable access to healthcare for all. We so typically think of all as “everyone like me, with my frustrations and my concerns” that we miss the bigger picture and it’s easy to think that losing telehealth is an inconvenience rather than a devastating move. But when all means the people in rural areas who typically must travel hours to access healthcare, or the millions of inner city residents who share one local doctor’s office, it becomes easier to understand that telehealth isn’t a novelty. It isn’t new. It isn’t “just for COVID.” It’s healthcare. Period.
From there, it’s not a significant leap to using telehealth to empower patients to take charge of and direct their own health. That’s because telehealth is, and can be, more than just logging in to a video session with a doctor. Done well, telehealth includes a collaborative digital environment where patients can review doctor’s appointments and notes; view, print, and transfer their medical records; view and download labwork and x-rays; ask their doctor and pharmacist questions when something seems amiss with medication; and even involve wellness coaches and nutritionists who can benefit from having access to patient data.
The naysayers will cry that the public, and particularly those who have historically lacked access to healthcare, don’t have the knowledge or capability to understand labwork and x-rays, and that it would confound the process of providing quality healthcare. But reality is that healthcare is changing. Patients want to understand what’s happening to their bodies and they want to have a conversation. Whether that is in person or on video has nothing to do with it.
My company, HealthIV, is working to transform healthcare through a robust, expanded telehealth system that is custom-tailored to patients, and guides them through readily understandable, available, on-demand access to their own health data. Imagine receiving an alert, not only that bloodwork has been completed, but that your Vitamin D or Iron is low, and you should call your doctor for a followup.
Empowered patients are more invested in their health and wellness. We’ve known for years that those who understand, or are given the opportunity to understand, what’s happening with their health are more likely to engage and are healthier than those who don’t. And so there’s no reason not to facilitate patient empowerment.
The point of telehealth’s explosion may have been to protect people from COVID, but that’s not it’s only purpose. The value of telehealth to create equitable access to healthcare over the longterm and to empower patients to manage and direct their own health is already here. And it will continue to grow and shape healthcare whether health and wellness providers engage with it or not; the outcome will be better if we do. The future of telehealth is health. And it’s up to every provider to make it work in the favor of patients. Period.
Rural hospitals are facing an exorbitant amount of pressure, and the pressure doesn’t seem likely to subside any time soon.
Whether it’s the ongoing labor shortage, the constantly changing regulatory environment or other market forces, the headwinds, at times, seem insurmountable. Couple those concerns with the constant worries about cyberattacks and security vulnerabilities, and the moment seems even more challenging.
It’s not that rural health organizations can’t tackle any of the issues head-on. It’s more a matter of rural health organizations often don’t have the staff or resources to address this topic.
As a result, security is often an afterthought. How rural hospitals and communities focus on security presents an interesting dilemma because they’re vulnerable from a cybersecurity side and particularly vulnerable if their security posture is left unaddressed.
According to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, 150 rural hospitals nationwide closed between 2005 and 2019, and even more closed in 2020. While funding has helped slow the trend of closures amid the pandemic, rural providers still face challenges, partly because they have higher proportions of vulnerable patients, the elderly or the chronically ill.
However, rural health providers still have an arrow left in their quiver: technology. Increasingly, they’re turning to technology to ensure their staff can focus on delivering quality healthcare to patients without forgoing the most pressing needs and cybersecurity in particular.
Cybersecurity is the centerpiece of the path forward
Last year was among the worst years for ransomware attacks on healthcare. Healthcare is an ideal target; private health data is lucrative to sell on the dark web, and providers are more likely to pay ransoms with lives on the line.
Ransomware-as-a-service has also made it easier than ever to launch an attack, making it critical to invest in health IT platforms with built-in security solutions.
However, many rural providers cannot afford to invest in the same technology as their larger counterparts. They often face lean IT teams and limited budgets, constraining their investments and limiting what percentage of their budget they can spend on security.
Rural providers often find themselves on the unfortunate side of the digital divide, whether it’s clinician shortages or a suboptimal revenue cycle that results in a lack of capital. The result is that they may be unaware of the latest security updates, and even if they are, they often can’t implement them.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Rural providers can take steps to stay secure.
Healthcare facilities need efficient inventory management to keep operations running smoothly. Healthcare inventory management involves monitoring and overseeing the items in stock for patient use. These items could be implants, syringes, lab coats, nitrile gloves, cotton swabs, blood test kits, or other consumables. While the larger items in stock might be easy to track, handlers could find it challenging to account for the smaller ones.
Proper medical inventory management is essential for the delivery of first-rate healthcare services. The process should accurately account for the movement of items during delivery, storage, and usage. It should also collect usage data so inventory managers can order the right amount of each item each time they restock. To ensure this inventory management process is effective, healthcare facilities need end-to-end workflows that are quick and easy. It should also not cause delays when a medical practitioner needs an item to attend to a patient. Most modern hospitals have IT systems that help them manage their inventory.
With the right IT system, hospitals should know the precise location of each item and their remaining quantity. Their inventory management systems must be robust but flexible to handle supply chain disruptions without affecting the delivery of healthcare services. Some healthcare facilities opt for managed IT services from third-party to ensure their IT systems are always functional because inventory management is critical to their operations.
Healthcare Inventory Tracking
Healthcare inventory management is complex and involves many departments in a medical facility. It is impossible to predict the ailment of every patient and the medical supplies to be used on them. Even if there are planned surgeries, a need for additional inventory can suddenly arise. This urgent need might require an item to be transferred from another department or ordered from a supplier. Without an efficient inventory tracking system, these items might not be recorded. However, with the advancement in medical technology, inventory tracking is possible.
It is important to note that inventory is mobile in a healthcare facility, so the management system should be capable of tracking them effectively for audit purposes. It should also facilitate the data capture of all items used for medical procedures.
Their symptoms—sudden weakness, numbness, paralysis on one side of the body, slurred speech, and blurred vision—can resemble those of other conditions. As a result, doctors sometimes misdiagnose strokes. In this blog post, we will examine different types of strokes, their causes, and how you can get the right compensation in the event of a misdiagnosis.
The Different Kinds of Strokes
Ischemic strokes and cerebral hemorrhages are the two most common types of strokes. Ischemic strokes account for 87% of all strokes, and occur when a blood clot blocks an artery that supplies blood to the brain. A cerebral hemorrhage is a type of stroke caused by a ruptured blood vessel bleeding into the brain.
Another less frequent stroke type is the transient ischemic attack (TIA), which is often called a mini-stroke. This type of stroke happens when a blood clot temporarily blocks an artery to the brain.
Causes of Stroke Misdiagnosis
One reason strokes are misdiagnosed is because their symptoms can mimic those of other conditions. For example, the sudden onset of weakness or paralysis on one side of the body can also be a heart attack symptom. In some cases, the symptoms of a TIA may be so brief that they are dismissed as a “funny turn” or “spell” and not diagnosed as a warning sign of an impending stroke.
Other times, strokes are misdiagnosed because diagnostic tests for strokes are not always reliable. For example, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans are not always able to detect ischemic strokes in their early stages. Occasionally, it is an IT issue. The electronic medical record (EMR) might not be updated in a timely fashion with the results of diagnostic tests, or the order for a test might get lost in the system.
Technology has had a massive role to play in the improvement of the globe as a whole. The world is now closer than ever, with the internet bringing us technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. While the Internet of things may be highly nuanced, this niche technology is widely used across industries, including the medical and healthcare sector. In the last 50 years, we have made monumental leaps in the league of healthcare by introducing revolutionary models that were once a distant dream.
Today, the life expectancy of humans is higher than ever, with the help of research and development and treatments that are a product of technology. For instance, the speed at which the COVID-19 vaccines were researched, tested, devised, and administered on a global scale is no less than a miracle, as compared to the number of lives the Spanish Influenza took in 1918. To have a deeper understanding of the strides made in these aspects, this blog will address five areas where Hong Kong’s healthcare has benefitted from technological expansion.
Diagnostics and testing
One of the best things to happen to humanity is the creation of diagnostic tools that can perform tests of all kinds. Not only do these extensive tests help in the early detection of lethal diseases, but can help in prevention, control, and treatment. Several chronic conditions like cancer were detected a little too late in the past. However, today Hong Kong has experts with whom you can get a Hospital Authority Referral for routine checks, focused diagnostics, and scans. These are not now a vital aspect of preventive healthcare.
Wearables
Wearable technology is no less than a futuristic concept in the flesh for us here in 2022. There are several gadgets that can help you stay healthier and live a long life with life-saving capabilities. For instance, there are wearables for people with heart problems to administer controlled and minor electrocution in order to revive the heart if there are instances of cardiac arrhythmia or an arrest. Additionally, there are also devices that can help diabetics keep their insulin levels under control with a patch wearable that helps regulate their vitals.
Tracking Data
Apart from treatment and operation-based technologies, there are several other purposes that AI can be used in medical care. One of the biggest uses at present is health monitors that can track the health statistics of people. At the most nascent phase, it could be fitness bands that keep track of sleep quality, menstrual cycles, weight management, and the like. But at advanced and clinical stages, wearables are used to monitor patients under clinical trial programs to accumulate data and glean actionable insights.
Healthcare facilities need efficient 