As we continue to walk this earth, our existence, survival, and sustainability depend on a primary key, our health. It is a global, crucial concern for scientists, individuals, medical personnel, and regional and international organizations like WHO. People are encouraged to keep track of their health records for proper health assessment and healthcare delivery.

Health data serves as a hedge against ignorance, creating awareness for people and their health status. It involves laboratory test results, blood sample analysis, observations, patient demographic information, etc. This data gets collected in different regions globally as an archive for health checks to improve services, create cures faster and more efficiently, enhance scientific research, and offer individuals a well-structured, balanced health system.

Having an organized, error-free library of health data for reviews and modification of health services is pertinent to improving and promoting decent healthcare systems in a country, state, or region. How can we standardize health data most effectively?

Importance of health data

Our life revolves around data, specifically our data. Whether our academic, workplace, demographic, economic, or financial data, we constantly produce data that benefits us, the companies we work for or own, and governments worldwide. So what makes health data important?

1. It serves healthy individuals and patients with proper health updates and efficient lookouts for their health status, enlightening them with insights on their safety and appropriate modification of their behavior.

2. It offers healthcare systems correct, up-to-date information to improve their strategies and forecast future health occurrences.

3. It provides health providers with essential knowledge of adequate healthcare redesigns.

4. It allows for health investigations and research where medical personnel can source solutions to health gaps.

Technology in healthcare

Technology has walked through the 21st century, adding special effects to our journey and improving different industries and daily tasks. We are witnessing how it enhances workforce labor, time maximization, and efficiency in our daily interactions, expanding from analog to digital computers, phones, and AI.

The technological span has also left its mark in the health sector and introduced us to digital health, including technologies that simplify and automate healthcare services. Medical representatives now assist and communicate with patients at ease with the leverage of technology, like assistive technology, robots, simulations, and augmented and virtual reality.

Is the current technology in health enough?

After experiencing the benefits of digital health, there are raised alarms in the drift of primary to secondary use of health data. Users secondarily pass their health data to healthcare organizations for research purposes, statistical records, and business purposes.

A centralized system

Just like traditional financing requires an intermediary (central system) for monitoring and controlling finances, the health sector also faces the same intermediary challenge. Health bodies possess the user’s health data and expose it to healthcare providers with less visibility to its owner, where the latter can’t even consent to it being shared or used.

Cyber insecurity

Another concern is the cyber insecurity of health data, where the demographic info of owners gets stolen for criminal impersonation. Outsiders can gain access to this data through hacks, insiders with criminal records, and carelessness of people’s information via poor technological security, rendering vulnerability to individuals with health profiles. All those challenges faced in the healthcare system infused distrust in people when sharing data.

A need for more technological improvement

A call has been put across the airwaves regarding the central regulation of health care, pleading for a change in the course of a user-friendly and highly secured healthcare system. While we cherish the beauty of modernization, we can’t rule technology out of consideration. And, of course, we can’t ignore maintaining our health, the golden ingredient of a happy, sustainable life.

Blockchain solving our concerns

All these concerns have driven the world’s focus on improving technology in the health sector to ensure privacy, security, integrity, transparency, and data immutability. A blockchain solution can properly digitize health and offer a decentralized solution that places users at the center of healthcare so they can own their health data and consent to who can access it.

Users have heartily adopted cryptocurrency with blockchain as its building brick. For those wondering why, here is the answer: Blockchain became a trusted platform by people as they own the network, put the rules, and ensure that records are valid and not altered. This Web3 technology ensures immutability, speed, security, and decentralization. Healthy people and patients can use this system of interconnected nodes for data sharing with complete control of the database without any third-party involvement.

dHealth as a Solution

dHealth chose to harness the power of blockchain, paving the way for users to own their health data. It eliminates the dominance of others monopolizing this data for business and black commercials. The layer-1 blockchain platform by dHealth targets healthcare as a priority and allows for more use cases to be built on its infrastructure. You can start your healthcare journey and initiate a health data archive by downloading the dHealth wallet and establishing an identity with its unique protocol.

Health, again, is essential for man’s existence. And to improve this sector and regain people’s faith in it, we should ensure up-to-date, immutable health records. As an ill sector can’t heal us, we should strive to restore trust in the global healthcare field and design more solutions, noting that anyone can build a dApp on top of dHealth’s blockchain in a step to save healthcare and serve people.

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