bgnhjkxxx

Exploring a new frontier in healthcare technology

A wave of digital transformation has washed over healthcare in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in the accelerated adoption of digital health solutions such as telemedicine, remote monitoring and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), robotics and artificial intelligence (AI).
This, according to a SingHealth news release, caused an upward surge in the generation and flow of health data, which is expected to continue as healthcare providers, including ophthalmologists, and patients grow more accustomed to digital solutions, and healthcare systems gear up with emerging technologies to tackle the challenges of the future.
With this increase in digital health data, a team of clinicians from SingHealth anticipate a growing need for privacy-preserving solutions to empower patients to take greater ownership of their health and to enhance the applications of data for medical research and clinical care purposes. In a recently published editorial piece in the journal Nature Medicine,1 the team explored the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a potential data management solution to bridge this gap and revolutionize data exchange in healthcare.
According to the news release, an NFT is a unique digital data unit stored on the blockchain, under a single ownership that is irreplaceable, and which can be traded. Like digital assets that are traded as commercial NFTs today, health data can be minted, exchanged and stored using blockchain technology, bearing the same features of uniqueness, transparency and interoperability. This means that patients will be able to own their personal health data and exchange it as digital assets with multiple stakeholders, such as healthcare providers, using the same blockchain technology.
Similar to how cryptocurrencies are traded with mobile wallets, each patient can own, store and share their health data in the form of NFTs using a health wallet hosted on a secure web-based or smartphone application, making this mode of data management easily accessible, yet secure and private.
Moreover, the news release noted the key difference between existing commercial NFT marketplaces and a blockchain ledger dedicated to the exchange of health data is that the health data ledger can be programmed to disallow public viewing of its data. When a patient needs to share their health data with a healthcare provider, they can give the healthcare provider access to and allow them to view the required information. This preserves patient privacy, only allowing data owners – the patients themselves – to permit the access and sharing of their personal health data.

[Read More…]

Tags: No tags