How blockchain technology can help medical reform

In China and even around the world, medical reform is a hot public topic. From former US President Obama's medical reform plan to Israel's universal health care, how to provide better medical services is an issue that all countries focus on and try to make breakthroughs. Therefore, countries have invested huge human, material and financial resources in medical reform. The rise of blockchain technology in recent years may provide some help in medical reform.

There are three essential aspects of medical reform: first, the level of medical technology cannot solve all medical needs; second, the problem of uneven distribution of medical resources; and third, the problem of the lack of circulation of medical information.

The absolute technical level of medical research cannot cure all diseases, and the price of newly invented medical technology is too high. These are the two main problems facing the level of medical technology. The problem of medical resource distribution exists in all countries and regions, that is, effective high-quality resources cannot be enjoyed by those who need them most. The most important thing is the circulation of medical information, which is the core part of the construction of my country's medical system based on community medical care and supported by core hospitals.

Blockchain happens to have certain advantages in solving these problems.

The familiar aspirin was developed by Bayer laboratories after decades of research. There is no doubt that the research of medical technology requires a lot of money and time reserves. The story told by the popular movie "Dying to Survive" last year directly reflects a real problem: many anti-cancer drugs today have been successfully developed but cannot be widely used. The main reason is that the price of drugs is too high, and the reason for this is the result of excessive investment by R&D companies.

Blockchain can solve this problem. Through a decentralized financing model, it encourages society to innovate with the greatest strength. In this way, the single investment problem is solved, and the R&D investment of each research node is reduced accordingly.

The Bayer laboratory research team spent nearly 40 years developing aspirin and experienced more than 200 failures. If the blockchain model is introduced, the direction and project will be distributed to all parts of the world through the blockchain R&D network during the trial stage, and project teams composed of local industry experience will conduct research, which is equivalent to putting eggs in different baskets, which can greatly increase the success rate of the experiment.

Traditional R&D emphasizes "exclusive patents", high risk and high return, that is, the first successful person will reap all the rights and interests, which makes the time competition very stressful, and the test of technical level and psychological quality is also very great, because as long as you are slower than others, then all your efforts will be in vain. Blockchain can redefine this logic, and the efforts of all participants will not be in vain, but the results will be shared. This will enable more people to concentrate on research, improve the efficiency of drug research and development, and decentralized research and development will also reduce the pressure of single investment. There is reason to believe that under this model, the efficiency of medical technology research will increase rapidly, the terminal consumer price will drop rapidly, and more people will benefit.

However, the focus of blockchain technology in solving medical problems is not here, because there may be some issues that need to be discussed during the promotion process due to the ethics of medical experiments and the sensitivity of medical and patient data. The key is the balance of medical resources and the circulation of data, where the advantages of blockchain technology can be more obvious.

The lack of information exchange between hospitals is a difficult problem to solve in traditional medicine. A patient's information can only be stored in the database of one hospital , which brings many inconveniences to patients who need to transfer to other hospitals for treatment. What is particularly impressive is that the handwriting of many doctors' prescriptions is very "unique", and only the hospital where they are located can understand it. No one can recognize it if they go to other hospitals, which means that patients have to either change hospitals for re-consultation and examination, or go back to the previous hospital for treatment. Today, with the popularization of hospital informatization, doctors' diagnoses and prescriptions are entered into computers and saved in the hospital data center, and the problem of handwritten prescriptions being difficult to identify has been solved. However, although the digital storage function has been realized, the problem of data exchange between hospitals still exists.

In fact, it is not difficult to understand. Medical information is highly sensitive personal information and needs to be kept highly confidential. The general practice of hospitals is to establish a confidentiality system, set up special permissions to control copying and dissemination, and select appropriate storage media such as CDs and restricted hard drives, etc., and use management systems to avoid risks or accountability. If data is interoperable between hospitals, the probability of patient medical information being leaked will greatly increase, and it will be difficult to verify the leak link, which will be very difficult to verify and hold accountable. Based on the above reasons, it is understandable that hospitals manage patient information in a closed manner.

Blockchain has its own unique advantages in this regard, because one of the biggest features of blockchain is decentralization. All medical information no longer exists in the data center of a specific hospital, but is randomly stored in different devices. That is, the case information of Hospital A may exist in Computer C of Hospital B, and it appears in the form of random codes and numbers. Without the secret key, the real information content cannot be known. The owner of this secret key is the patient himself. Only when he needs to extract his own case information or authorize his case information to be viewed by a specific person, these codes and numbers will be transformed into meaningful content.

In this way, there will no longer be the concept of a centralized information center, and all hospitals will not be responsible for this information, and there will be no need to worry about it being stolen or abused. It is best for patients to keep it themselves; patients can also choose which hospital to go to for treatment according to their needs. Patients will have more freedom in seeking medical treatment, and the pressure on large hospitals will be reduced accordingly.