Frost & Sullivan’s global TechVision’s team has found that blockchain technology is being looked into by technologists in order to resolve security concerns that surround the implementation of an Internet of Medical Things. In order to give medical patients the ability to choose the therapy that best suits them, better and secure access to medical data is becoming an increasing problem. Healthcare providers need to find more efficient ways of extracting meaningful information from medical records – processing and analysing massive amounts of data produced by advanced and connected and devices, which has led to the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT).
Bhargav Rajan, Frost & Sullivan TechVision Industry Analyst, noted: “Sharing of medical data or transmission of medical data through the cloud is a recent trend and is gaining traction, even in developing nations, with the healthcare industry becoming digitized. IoMT will accelerate the development of advanced medical devices that can seamlessly transfer structured information to electronic health records more efficiently than existing technologies.”
While IoMT has many benefits, it also brings about IT security vulnerabilities that could expose highly sensitive and confidential data to cyber and phishing attacks. In order to combat this threat, employing blockchain technology could be used to enable a highly secure, decentralized framework for data sharing. Using a combination of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, companies could keep an audit trail of all transactions. Predictive modelling used in combination with big data analytics could also reduce healthcare costs and improve patient experiences and outcomes.
Rajan explained: “Blockchain technology in IoMT will allow patient records to be automatically fed with real-time data of the patients, which will subsequently be sent to healthcare providers over a secure network through a web-enabled platform. Through this process, personalized care can be delivered to a patient in a remote location.”
