Can Clinical Trials Be Revolutionized by Using Blockchain?

In the most recent years, blockchain, a development most outstandingly connected with digital currencies, captures the attention of professionals and organizations in the healthcare sector. This new technology is attracting huge interest in the research network that can give answers to all the clinical trial issues. Blockchain technology uses a distributed ledger network platform that empowers databases to store transaction records and documents that are time-stamped along with the historical detail.

Benefits of Using Blockchain in Clinical Trials

• There are many advantages of integrating blockchain technology into clinical research, starting from tracking, sharing information, transparency, and data privacy concerns for patients. Blockchain technology will have the option to directly increase the quality and quantity of patients enlisted for clinical trials in many ways.
• Blockchain’s distributed ledger technology could enable individual patients to store their medicinal information by anonymous methods, thereby allowing visibility to trail recruiters, who could then connect with the patients if their information meets all requirements for the clinical trial.
• Further, it could likewise streamline communication among doctors and patients during the trial. Blockchain has the tools to offer smart contracts that embrace traceability and transparency over clinical trial arrangements and can offer financial remuneration for the patient’s participation and sharing their information.
• Blockchain technology can solve many problems and provide an associating link to map the same. It can expedite tracking and helps in the retrieval of the exclusive patient-specific lab sample and brief about the consent.
• Besides, blockchain technology will help in co-relating the possibility of using mapping with specific country local regulations, which are mandated by the government or geographic districts and administrative bodies.
• Blockchain permits reaching a significant degree of accuracy and security of information for the entire document flow in the clinical trial. Subsequently, it guarantees traceability, avoids an analytical reconstruction and takes into consideration safely automating the clinical trial through Smart Contracts.
• Moreover, the good clinical trial needs to be more transparent as possible; concerning when, where, and by whom the data was entered and other information like who has the authorization to get what information. Audit trails offer this understanding and blockchain can make it to the next level by improving transparency, privacy, and security.

Healthcare Companies Moving Towards Blockchain

The worldwide effect of implementing this technology will be both timely and significant. The co-development of blockchain and clinical research is still in its early stages, yet scientists are persistently working together to discover better approaches for reducing expenses and saving time for a wide scope of applications in the clinical trial environment. Finally, their efforts will bring in less expensive drugs for everybody.

Reasons Why Healthcare Companies are Moving towards Blockchain

• Blockchain would help in solving some of the industry’s most critical problems, like interoperability, data security issues, and also it empowers new patient-driven plans of action. Blockchain offers the internet its definitive decentralization objective.
• Personal information security, reproducibility, information sharing concerns and patient registration in clinical trials are some of the medical difficulties faced in contemporary clinical research. This new technology, blockchain, might be a vital aspect of addressing these difficulties and should draw the attention of the entire clinical research network.
• Considering the future, it is possible that obtaining this data does not require third-parties at all. A team of other network members could confirm and process the transaction, adding the block of transactions to the chain and getting tokens for completing the confirmation task. Through this procedure, a third-party is not needed to deal with the exchange of currency and information.
• Another important feature is, a patient could put their information for sale and an organization would request to pay for accessing it.
• Besides having proven their ability to support decentralized cryptocurrencies, nevertheless, blockchains could be utilized to handle the expense of building up trust in clinical research.

How Is Blockchain highly secure?

• The outstanding part about blockchain is that the data stored in the blockchain is difficult to hack, steal, infringe because the blockchain ledger is not stored in a single source, yet is spread throughout various databases in replicate copies. Moreover, these verification prerequisites guarantee that stored information stays immutable and intact.
• Furthermore, blockchain is a secure and safe platform for processing and storing a wide range of important data, from clinical trial analysis results, business workflow documents, medical data of the patient’s to blueprints of hereditary data.

Wrap up

Blockchain technology helps the healthcare industry by introducing transparency and accountability by offering authentic, synchronized, and secure information for submission to the regulatory received from trials. Moreover, Blockchain offers a chance to form a patient-driven environment by accessing accurate real-time data. Suffice to say, in the near future, a more practical objective should be drawn to address issues around reproducibility, data integrity, and provenance. By taking into consideration the advantages of blockchain, the experts will gradually embrace blockchain within the clinical research environment.