The pros and cons of using ChatGPT in Healthcare

Generative Pre-trained Transformer, often known as GPT, is an innovative kind of #ArtificialIntelligence (#AI) that can produce writing that seems to have been written by a person. OpenAI created this AI language model called ChatGPT. It is built using the GPT architecture and is trained on a large corpus of text data to respond to natural language inquiries that resemble a person’s requirements. 

This technology has lots of applications in #healthcare. This technology has the potential to improve the way #patients interact with healthcare providers and enhance the overall quality of healthcare services. Some people will immediately embrace ChatGPT as a medical resource, while others will avoid it for as long as they can. Both feelings are justified. The man who ignited the home computer revolution, #BillGates, believes ChatGPT will 'change the world,' claiming that AI is just as important as the PC and the internet. The need for accurate and current data is one of the major obstacles to adopting ChatGPT in healthcare. GPT must have access to precise and up-to-date medical data to provide trustworthy suggestions and treatment options.

Pros of including ChatGPT in our health care system

1. ChatGPT can provide real-time information and support, answering patients' questions and offering guidance on health-related topics, including symptoms and treatments.
2. It can help healthcare professionals automate various tasks and provide better treatment.
3. ChatGPT can educate patients on various health topics, such as managing chronic conditions, understanding treatment options, and adopting healthy lifestyles.
4. It can provide information and answer questions about health and wellness so that people can make informed decisions about their health.
5. ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by providing patients and healthcare professionals with access to medical information and clinical decision support.
6. It helps patients access medical information, such as symptoms, diagnoses, and treatment options, before or instead an appointment.
7. ChatGPT can help reduce the workload of healthcare professionals by automating routine tasks such as appointment scheduling.
8. It can help improve patient outcomes by providing personalized care plans based on individual needs.
9. ChatGPT can help reduce healthcare costs by providing more efficient care.
10. It can help improve patient satisfaction by providing a more convenient way to access medical information.

Cons of including ChatGPT in our health care system

1. One critical limitation is the potential for bias in the training data, which can result in biased or inaccurate responses.
2. ChatGPT is a statistical model, lacking the medical expertise and judgment of a healthcare professional. Even if it does score over 60% on a medical test, it cannot diagnose or treat medical conditions.
3. ChatGPT cannot provide hands-on learning experiences. Medical education requires practical training, and ChatGPT cannot replace the importance of hands-on training in medical education.
4. ChatGPT may not be able to understand complex medical terminology or nuances that are important for accurate diagnosis and treatment.
5. It may not be able to provide personalized care plans based on individual needs.
6. ChatGPT may not be able to provide accurate information about rare diseases or conditions that are not well understood.
7. It may not be able to provide accurate information about medications or treatments that are not well understood.
8. ChatGPT may not be able to provide accurate information about alternative therapies or treatments that are not well understood.
9. It may not be able to provide accurate information about mental health conditions or treatments.
10. ChatGPT may not be able to provide accurate information about emergency situations.

Conclusion

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model that has numerous advantages and applications in the healthcare and medical domains. It can assist medical professionals in various tasks, such as research, diagnosis, patient monitoring, and medical education. However, the use of ChatGPT also presents several ethical considerations and limitations such as credibility, plagiarism, copyright infringement, and biases. Therefore, before implementing ChatGPT, the potential limitations and ethical considerations need to be thoroughly assessed and addressed. Future research can focus on developing methods to mitigate these limitations while harnessing the benefits of ChatGPT in the healthcare and medical sectors.

Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 – History & Impact in Healthcare Industry

 

On November 18, 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released the draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 (DPDP Bill 2022), inviting suggestions and comments from relevant stakeholders. In its fourth iteration since 2017, the DPDP Bill 2022 attempts a better ‘comprehensive legal framework’. Previous versions of the proposed general data protection legislation drew heavily upon European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and were dense, voluminous documents, etc. The Bill draws inspiration from Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act, 2012, and is a condensed and concise document. The new bill is a lot simpler than the previous one as it is having only 24 pages as compared to 70 pages as well as 30 guidelines as compared to 90 in the previous draft bill.

Let’s first understand the status of privacy in the Indian context. As per Part III of the Indian Constitution, we have many fundamental rights like Right to Life & Personal Liberty, Right to Equality, Freedom of Speech & Expression, etc. Fundamental rights provide a high degree of protection from encroachment but the fundamental right to privacy was not guaranteed under the Constitution of India till 2017. Before 2017 in many cases e.g. M. P. Sharma vs. Satish Chandra and Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, the status of Privacy was not recognized as a Fundamental right. In Justice K. S. Puttaswamy v Union of India, the nine Judge Bench unanimously reaffirmed the right to privacy as a fundamental right under the Constitution of India. As per instruction of the Supreme Court of India an expert committee headed by Justice B. N. Srikrishna was created to examine various issues related to data protection in India. The Committee submitted its report and a draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Provisions related to Protected Health Information (PHI) are governed by the Information Technology Act, 2000, together with the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011. Patient data, including health information, is treated as sensitive personal data or information and under the IT Act offers some degree of protection to the collection, disclosure, and transfer of sensitive personal data. Also long before DPDP Bill 2022, the Government introduced the Digital Information Security in Healthcare Act (DISHA), India’s counterpart of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), aimed at providing healthcare data privacy, security, confidentiality, and standardization and establishment of the National Electronic Health Authority (NeHA) and Health Information Exchanges. While the purpose of this act is to encourage the pan-India adoption of e-health standards, DISHA has not yet come into force.

Digital Personal Data Protection 2022 Bill operates on a triad - Data Principal, Data Fiduciary, and Grievance Resolver. Unlike the GDPR, the bill boldly defines “harm”, “loss”, and “public interest” in small lists. A first in India’s legislative history, the bill uses “her” and “she” for an individual, irrespective of gender—a welcome populist and inclusive move. The Bill mandates obtaining consent for processing after providing notice in clear and plain language, “describing” the type of personal data sought to be collected and an ‘itemized’ list of the purposes of the processing. PDDP Bill 2022 allows the transfer of personal data outside India to countries notified by the Indian government.

The provisions for penalties in DPDP Bill 2022 Bill fall far short of other data protection legislation around the world, such as GDPR or similar laws in China. In the proposed bill, Healthcare Organizations are subject to penalties of up to ₹500 crores for non-compliance. Other than that, the bill includes a laundry list of penalties: up to ₹250 crores for failing to take adequate precautions against data breaches; ₹200 crores for failing to notify of a breach or complying with provisions related to children; ₹10 crores for violating data localization norms; ₹150 crores when a significant Healthcare Organization fails to carry out their additional obligations under the proposed law. A key ingredient in laws in other countries is the power to impose penalties up to a particular amount as prescribed for offenses or as a percentage of total worldwide turnover, whichever is higher.

A data principal is under an obligation to not register a false or frivolous complaint with a data fiduciary or the Board, not to furnish any false particulars or suppress any material information. DPDP Bill 2022 has introduced a penalty of up to ₹10,000/- (Rupees Ten Thousand) on the data principal for failure to comply with its proposed obligations.

The proposed DPDP Bill 2022 introduces the concept of ‘Deemed Consent’ where the data principal is deemed to have given consent for processing their personal data. Consensual processing of Personal Data may be done in case of medical emergencies involving a threat to life or an immediate threat to the health of the Data Principal. In the context of such processing, a parallel may be drawn with India’s draft Health Data Management Policy by NDHM released in April 2022 which also envisages provisions relating to the processing of Personal Data in case of medical emergencies. Notably, the NDHM contemplates the appointment of a nominee to provide valid consent on behalf of the Data Principal in case such Data Principal becomes seriously ill, or mentally incapacitated, or where the data principal is facing a threat to life or a severe threat to health and is unable to give valid consent. Unlike the DPDP Bill 2022, the NDHM does not propose Deemed Consent in absence of a nominee but rather shifts the right to give valid consent on behalf of the Data Principal to an adult member of the family of the Data Principal.

Despite the recommendation under the JPC Report, the DPDP Bill 2022 has kept the 'Non-Personal Data' of the individuals such as information collected by the Government, NGOs, and other private sector entities, outside its ambit. The usage of phrases 'as it may consider necessary' and 'as may be prescribed' can lead to administrative ambiguities. The autonomy of the Data Protection Board which is entrusted with overseeing the protection of individual's personal data and ensuring compliance with the provisions of the law is not reassuring. Further, the Government and its instrumentalities can retain personal data for an indefinite period irrespective of whether the purpose for which data was processed has been fulfilled.

By 2030 India is projected to be the world’s third-largest economy and will have one of the world’s largest digital personal data footprints in motion and at rest. The DPDP 2022 Bill’s essentiality shines in our strengthening role in the global order. With the G20 Presidency and multiple Free Trade and Regional Trade Agreements in place, we will have to find solutions for Data Free Flow with Trust and cross-border data flows.

Digital Health: Why Digital Health will become the new normal

During COVID-19 pandemic, terms like telehealth, telemedicine, remote-patient monitoring, virtual care and digital health are thrown around very commonly, though these terms have been around for years, but the recent situation is accelerating patient awareness and physician adoption of these technologies.

With a growing need for social isolation, healthcare organizations are actively seeking ways to provide health services to patients with both COVID-19 and other conditions remotely.

Start-up investing is not a new phenomenon in the financial world, but one sector, in particular, has seen a veritable boom in investors since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. While many industries plummeted in the first quarter of the year, digital health companies closed the first quarter of 2020 with unprecedented levels of funding. Private equity and venture capital financing of digital health start-ups reached an all-time high of just over $3 billion in Q1 2020. 

Digital health seeks to enhance administrative tools, clinical tools and patient interaction to make the healthcare experience more effective, efficient, and positive for patients. Healthcare is far behind in technology, and this industry is looking to fill that gap. Those of us who work in the digital health space want to take current healthcare experience, which is something like Blockbuster Video in the early 2000s and turn it into Netflix.

The Board of Governors in supersession of the Medical Council of India (MCI) issued Telemedicine Practice Guidelines on March 25 to strengthen delivery in a post-Covid-19 world, with a focus on Health and Wellness Centres (HWCs) that provide preventive and primary healthcare within a 5 km radius at the grassroots level.

Telemedicine is being used by doctors to connect with patients, and by mid-level provider/health workers to connect patients with doctors without patients having to physically visit a hospital or clinic. Even post lockdown, it will help reduce the burden on the secondary hospitals and improve documentation, data-collection, diagnosis and care without risking the safety of the patients or the health workers. It is already being used with success in some states for reproductive and child health and tuberculosis notification and outreach.

There is a persistent shortage of doctors, health workers and hospital beds in the country, especially in rural areas and densely populated underserved states. India has 1.1 million allopathic doctors registered with the Board of Governors/State Medical Councils in December 2019, according to the National Health Profile 2019.

India’s public health expenditure is just 1.28% of its GDP, with the per capita public health expenditure being Rs 1,657 in 2017-18. The rising cost of treatment has led to inequities in access, with people in under-served rural areas and urban slums among the worst hit. For people living in rural areas completely dependent on government hospitals and clinics, the government allopathic doctor-patient ratio is 1:10,926, shows NHP 2019 data.

For a population of 1.36 billion, this makes the doctor-population ratio 1:1,457, which is lower than the WHO recommended norm of 1:1,000. In addition to doctors, India has a little more than two million registered nurses and midwives, many of whom need infection control training to care for patients with communicable diseases, such as Covid-19 and tuberculosis. The WHO estimates there is a deficit of 6 lakh doctors and 20 lakh nurses in India. Further, doctors often have to perform many routine tasks like data entry, patient management; pharmacy interfacing, ensuring the right gear and equipment are present in the required quantities at the point-of-need, and so on—over and above their medical and caregiving duties.

Before Telemedicine Practice Guidelines, there was no legislation or guidelines on the practice of telemedicine through video, phone, and online platforms, which include the web, apps, chats, etc. The existing provisions under the MCI Act, 1956, MCI Regulations 2002, Drugs & Cosmetics Act, 1940 and Rules 1945, Clinical Establishment Act, 2010, Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Information Technology Rules 2011 primarily governed only the practice of medicine and information technology.

With such a large rural population and insufficient trained medical staff and rural healthcare facilities, India can rapidly adopt telemedicine capabilities to make up for the gap. E-consultations, which took off during the lockdown, can vastly improve access to healthcare in rural areas. Mobile and internet penetration in rural areas is accelerating, and telehealth can piggyback on this trend. A quick e-consultation can determine whether the person has a simple problem or needs to access a facility for a physical check-up. We may find that 50-60% of cases could be diagnosed in this manner, and the remaining might have to travel for a consultation—largely reducing the healthcare burden in the country.

Blockchain in healthcare: The Ultimate use case?

Many people have heard a lot about the blockchain in frames of a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin; however, it can have a much wider use than a simple payment method, including various industries. So, how does blockchain actually work in the healthcare industry? 

Health Care and Interoperability

Interoperability is a huge problem in the healthcare industry. In fact, improved healthcare interoperability is been a top priority for providers, policymakers, and patients for quite some time now.

So what are the two major areas when it comes to ineffective interoperability?

• The trouble of identifying patients
• Information blocking

The trouble of Identifying Patients

One of the most surprising things that we learned while researching for this guide. Apparently, there is still no universally recognized patient identifier. This despite the fact that organizations like CHIME and HIMSS have been pushing for its development for almost two decades.

This is truly shocking when you consider the fact that a unique patient identifier will be able to easily solve the problem of mismatched patient EHRs (Electronic health record) which has in the past led to several errors in patient care and increased the likelihood of patient harm.

This problem has been well expressed by the Director of Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI), Shaun Grannis.

“Matching the correct individual to his or her health data is critical to their medical care,” he says. “Statistics show that up to one in five patient records are not accurately matched even within the same health care system. As many as half of the patient records are mismatched when data is transferred between healthcare systems.”

So, how can the blockchain potentially solve this problem? Well, let’s look into it in a bit. Before we do so let’s look at the second problem that we have here.

Information Blocking

Despite being deemed an illegal practice, information blocking has been a problem in the healthcare industry. What do we mean by information blocking?

In the healthcare industry, information blocking is described as the result of “an unreasonable constraint imposed on the exchange of patient data or electronic health information.” According to the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, there are three criteria for identifying information blocking:

• There has been interference
• There has been knowledge
• There is no reason for the data to not be accessible.

It goes without saying that information blocking practices that involve unreasonable interference and awareness are a huge detriment to an efficient healthcare practice. Blocking can take place because of policies that prevent the sharing of information as well as practices that makes sharing extremely impractical.

The reason for this is pretty straightforward. Hospitals don’t want to lose out on patients and want to make it as difficult as possible for them to want to move on to another hospital.

In this digital age, this should have been a draconian practice, but various surveys and studies say otherwise.

• After surveying 60 HIE leaders, it was discovered that information blocking is extremely widespread and the various actions that have been taken to curb it are still extremely ineffective.
• 50% of respondents that have been studied by Adler-Milstein reportedly engaged with health IT companies by participating in information blocking. A quarter of these respondents also said that hospitals and health systems are guilty of this practice.

According to the researchers, information blocking can be curbed by one of the following methods:

• By increasing transparency so that each and every action that has been taken by the participants can be accounted for.
• There should be a strong financial incentive so that the participants will want to share information with each other.
• A collaborative relationship between health IT companies, hospitals, and HIEs could further curb information blocking.

Alright, so now we have acquainted ourselves with the interoperability issues that are eating up the healthcare industry from the inside. Now let’s see how the blockchain is going to help solve this issue.

Public and Private Blockchains

There are two specific kinds of blockchains out there:

• Public Blockchains
• Private Blockchains

Since both are blockchains, they provide a peer-to-peer network which offers a decentralized and immutable ecosystem which are synchronized via consensus protocols.

However, that’s where all the similarities end.

Public Chains

Public blockchains are the ones that we are most familiar with. Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. are all public blockchains and the reason why they are called so is pretty self-explanatory.

They are completely open ecosystems where anyone can take part in the ecosystem. The network also has an in-built incentive mechanism which rewards participants for taking part more thoroughly in the system.

So, that’s pretty awesome right, however, will the health care industry benefit from having a public blockchain? Well…not so much.

Firstly, as has been extremely well documented, the blocks in bitcoin and ethereum have a storage issue. Bitcoin has a little over 1mb of space per block which is simply not enough to run the kind of transactions and store the kind of data that healthcare institutes require.

Then we have the throughput problems which have also been pretty well-documented. Bitcoin can barely manage 7-8 transactions per second. The block confirmation time is 10 mins which just adds to the latency. Big healthcare institutes need to deal with huge blocks of transactions per day with near 0 latency. In fact, any sorts of latency can potentially be life-threatening

Public blockchains, especially the ones that follow the proof-of-work protocol like Bitcoin require an immense amount of computational power to solve hard puzzles. As such, it is really impractical for these institutes to spend so much money on consensus mechanisms.

Finally, public blockchains are open chains, which in itself is another detriment. Think about it, why should healthcare institutes try to interact with each other in a network where anyone can come in and become a part of it. Medical insitutes deal with highly-classified and sensitive data, why will they want anyone outside their circles to interact with it?

So, public chains are impractical for these purposes. However, there is one more kind of blockchain that is practical for healthcare institutes, and they are called private blockchains.

Private Chains

Private chains are..well…private.

Unlike public blockchains, these aren’t open to everyone. As a result, people who want to participate in the private chain must gain permission to be a part of this network. This is the reason why private chains are also called “permissioned blockchains.”

Because of this, there are restrictions to the kind of people who can actually take part in the consensus. Access for new participants could be given by the following:

• The existing participants who are taking part in the ecosystem.
• A regulated authority.
• A consortium.

Once an entity has joined the ecosystem, they can play a role in network maintenance. The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric is an example of a permissioned blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. It has been designed ground up to cater to these enterprise requirements.

These private chains have been specifically designed for enterprise needs and offer a lot of features like:

• Fast transactions
• Privacy
• High security

Ok, so we have one side of the equation, which is the private chain. However, there is one more piece of the puzzle that we must understand before we wrap our heads around how the medical industry will work on the blockchain.

Cryptographic Hash Functions

Hashing means taking an input string of any length and giving out an output of a fixed length. In the context of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the transactions are taken as an input and run through a hashing algorithm (Bitcoin uses SHA-256) which gives an output of a fixed length.

Let’s see how the hashing process works. We are going put in certain inputs. For this exercise, we are going to use the SHA-256 (Secure Hashing Algorithm 256).

There are quite a lot of properties that makes hash functions pretty darn useful. We have covered these earlier, however, let’s focus on a few of them for now.

Property 1: Deterministic

This means that no matter how many times you parse through a particular input through a hash function you will always get the same result. This is critical because if you get different hashes every single time it will be impossible to keep track of the input.

Property 2: Pre-Image Resistance

What pre-image resistance states is that given H(A) it is infeasible to determine A, where A is the input and H(A) is the output hash. Let’s take an example.

Here is a hash:

559AEAD08264D5795D3909718CDD05ABD49572E84FE55590EEF31A88A08FDFFD

Can you determine what was the input that generated this exact hash? You will have a hard time determining it. It won’t be impossible, it will just be extremely irritating and time-consuming.

Property 3: Snowball Effect

This property states that even if you make a small change in your input, the changes that will be reflected in the hash will be huge. Let’s test it out using SHA-256:

You see that? Even though you just changed the case of the first alphabet of the input, look at how much that has affected the output hash.

Now let’s bring it all together and see how a permissioned blockchain can help end the interoperability problem in the healthcare industry.

Permissioned Healthcare Blockchain

Imagine a network on healthcare institutes where they don’t own a patient’s personal data. The data all belong in the blockchain. The patients are identified via their hash ID which will be their unique identifier. The hashing allows the ID to be unique and secures the privacy of the user (see Property #2 above).

The blockchain can also aid in the creation of a patient information sharing marketplace. This way, it will be possible to actually incentivize information sharing between the different institutes to prevent any kind of info blocking.

However, what if we still have some malicious actors who attempt to do information blocking or tampering?

In that case two of the blockchain’s most significant features will step up and handle this situation:

Firstly, the blockchain is a transparent medium. Anyone, who is part of the network, can look into the blockchain and look at how each transaction takes place and whether all the relevant information is getting passed through or not.

Secondly, we have anti-tampering.

If anyone tries to block the data then via the snowball effect, it will change the hash drastically. Now, remember, that the blocks in the blockchain are linked to one another via a hash pointer. Each block in the blockchain stores the hash of the data that is stored in the previous block. If the data inside any one of the blocks change, it sets up a chain reaction which could freeze up the whole blockchain. Since this is a theoretical impossibility, it is impossible to tamper with any data that is inside the blockchain.

Other Advantages of the Medical Healthcare Blockchain

So, now that we know how interoperability can be solved, what other amazing advantages can the blockchain bring to the medical healthcare institute?

• Since the blockchain is Immutable and traceable, patients can easily send records to anyone without the fear of data corruption or tampering.
• Similarly, a medical record that has been generated and added to the blockchain will be completely secure.
• The patient can have some control over how their medical data gets used and shared by the institutes. Any party which is looking to get the medical data about a patient could check with the blockchain to get the necessary permission.
• The patient can also be incentivized to for good behavior via a reward mechanism. Eg. they can get tokens for following a care plan or for staying healthy. Also, they can be rewarded by tokens for giving their data for clinical trials and research
• Pharma companies need to have an extremely secure supply chain because of the kind of product they carry. Pharma drugs are consistently stolen from the supply chain to be sold illegally to various consumers.  Also, counterfeit drugs alone cost these companies, nearly $200 billion annually. A transparent blockchain will help these companies to enable close tracking of drugs to their point of origin and thus help eliminate falsified medication.

Image Credit: PwC 

• Various medical institutes around the world conduct their own research and clinical trials on various new drugs and medications. A blockchain will help create a single global database to collect all this data and put them in one place.
• Insurance fraud is a major problem that is affecting the healthcare industry. This happens when dishonest providers and patients submit false claims/information to receive payable benefits. To get an understanding of how serious this problem is, try to wrap your head around this: According to Boyd Insurance, Medicare fraud in the U.S. alone costs about $68 billion a year.

In fact, according to the charts, the top two kinds of healthcare frauds are healthcare related.

Jack Liu, CEO of ALLIVE, an intelligent healthcare ecosystem based on blockchain technology, believes that the blockchain is going to help solve this problem. According to him,

“A blockchain environment can eliminate a large portion of this fraud when providers and patients must enter their information and data to be verified, recorded and stored and health insurance companies must have access to that data.”

Since all the data will not be stored in a centralized infrastructure, it will be impossible to hack the system and get their hands on all of the data. This keeps the system leakage-free and it also helps secure the privacy of the patients.

The Detractors

Obviously, not everyone is on-board with the idea of basing the healthcare industry on the and around the blockchain technology. One of those detractors happens to be John Halamka, the Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a Harvard University teaching hospital. He has already worked on several production blockchain applications, so he is intimately familiar with how it works and its potential use-cases.

According to him,

“Blockchain is not meant for storage of large data sets. Blockchain is not an analytics platform. Blockchain has very slow transactional performance. However, as a tamperproof public ledger, blockchain is ideal for proof of work. Blockchain is highly resilient”.

Blockchain in HealthcareConclusion

So, there you have it. We have listed down the various advantages that the blockchain can potentially impart to the healthcare industry. Obviously, until we see a proper implementation of this partnership, this is all hearsay. What we can state for a fact, is that various other institutes and spaces have already started experimenting and working with the blockchain technology.

This space has no lack of money. In fact, consider the following statistics:

• The funding of digital health startups reached an all-time high in the first quarter of 2018
• Global annual health spending surpassed $7 trillion dollars in 2015
• By 2020, the global annual health spending is expected to have ballooned to over $8.734 trillion.

As such, they should be under no financial constraints to research new and exciting technologies. All signs are pointing towards a decentralized medical future. Let’s see why.

According to a report by BIS research, by 2025, the healthcare industry can save upto $100 billion per year by 2025 in data breach-related costs, IT costs, operations costs, support function and personnel costs, counterfeit-related frauds and insurance frauds if they incorporate the blockchain technology.

The report also states that the use of

“a global blockchain in the healthcare market is expected grow at a CAGR of 63.85% from 2018 to 2025, to reach a value of $5.61 billion by 2025. The use of blockchain for healthcare data exchange will contribute the largest market share throughout the forecast period, reaching a value of $1.89 billion by 2025, owing to the use of blockchain to solve the most widespread problem in healthcare information systems related to interoperability and non-standardization that has created data silos in the industry.”

According to the report and the way the blockchain is being adopted by various sectors, it definitely looks like the future of the healthcare industry is indeed decentralized. Let’s hope that the blockchain technology provides the horizontal innovation boost to this industry that it desperately needs.

Major portion of this article taken from 

https://blockgeeks.com/guides/blockchain-in-healthcare/