Читать книгу Pet-Specific Care for the Veterinary Team - Группа авторов - Страница 171

Current systems for sharing electronic data among doctors, patients, referral hospitals, laboratories, and insurers are still quite error prone. Incorrect information can emerge as patient data are reentered time after time by different individuals and it is difficult to conserve changes made by one party into everyone's version of the medical record. So, for example, if a patient is seen by both a primary care and a specialty clinic, changes made to the medical records at either facility are not immediately captured in the medical records of both facilities, and require multiple steps to send, receive, and enter information; errors and omissions are possible at all stages.

Blockchain can be used to provide all clients and providers with identical content. The decentralized ledger approach to information management gives all parties simultaneous access to a single record of strongly encrypted data at relatively low cost. It also creates an audit trail each time any data item in the record is changed, helping to maintain the integrity of the system and its information. Eventually, blockchain could be used to provide secure and accurate medical information for all individual patients.

With blockchain technology, clients could actually play some role in managing the medical records of their pets and permission can be given to different providers and entities to access and modify those records, where all such modification attempts are securely recorded, annotated, and largely tamper‐proof.

If a pet has received treatments from multiple doctors at different facilities, all that information can be accessed from the blockchain, and there would be an audit trail for any changes made. Ultimately, the success of any such system depends on the participation of many medical providers, or there are few benefits over those seen with traditional electronic medical records.

One of the main benefits for blockchain use in healthcare is that it is decentralized, which provides enhanced security. Because the data record is replicated across many nodes rather than on one central computer, it is more resistant to a hacking attempt or manipulation. If any one computer is hacked, other separate computers in the network that are using the blockchain would still maintain accurate information.

Blockchain itself does not perform analytics, but permission could be granted for analytics to be performed on such data. This could be extremely powerful in veterinary medicine in which large numbers of small clinics exist globally, but a single database could potentially be mined for a wealth of information relative to pet‐specific care (such as breed predispositions, disease prevalence, epidemiology, etc.).

Other areas where blockchain can prove very useful is with online directories of doctors and other healthcare providers. Hospitals, doctors' groups, laboratories, and insurers all try to maintain their own online listings, but these frequently become outdated or require providers to notify the entities that the information has changed or is outdated. With blockchain, providers can update their own information at will. Especially in veterinary medicine, with so many clinics unaffiliated with one another and potentially using different practice management software, there can be many islands of information with very few opportunities for data bridges. Blockchain can help address that.

Another area of importance for blockchain is the management of personal data online. With blockchain, a patient's entire medical record can be stored in a ledger and encrypted with a private key. Changes in this information can be communicated to the ledger with the patient's authorization and securely shared with various providers. Because of the audit trail feature, everyone is aware exactly who made a change, when the change occurred, and what was changed.

There are many other potential applications, from managing prescriptions through the blockchain so that all participants know when and where a prescription was filled, to tracking laboratory results through the system, to verifying veterinary licensing. and updating information directly.