Journal of Patient Care

Potential Applications of Block Chain Technology to Improve Patient Safety in Health Care System

Wilhelm Kraus^* Department of Public and Occupational Health, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
^*Correspondence: Wilhelm Kraus, Department of Public and Occupational Health, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Email:

Received: 01-May-2023, Manuscript No. JPC-23-21695 ; Editor assigned: 04-May-2023, Pre QC No. JPC-23-21695 (PQ); Reviewed: 18-May-2023, QC No. JPC-23-21695 ; Revised: 25-May-2023, Manuscript No. JPC-23-21695 (R); Published: 01-Jun-2023, DOI: 10.35248/2573-4598.23.9.235

Description

Patient safety is defined as the absence of unnecessary harm to patients while they are getting care and the reduction of avoidable harm to an acceptable level [1]. To enable long-term and significant safety gains, organizational leadership, transparent policies, talented healthcare personnel, systematic reporting, and effective patient involvement in their treatment are all required [2]. These medical errors are the result of various inadequacies that limit the healthcare system's full potential, including poor interoperability, a lack of event reporting, communication and a lack of effective data sharing [3]. Various tools and strategies, such as communication protocols and clinical decision support tools, have been created and deployed to prevent these adverse outcomes. Despite these efforts, there is still a lack of communication and interoperability concerns across stakeholders as a result of inconsistent data storage and reporting techniques, which limits providers' capacity to provide excellent treatment [4]. Furthermore, present healthcare systems are plagued by a lack of "correct" information, systematic reporting, and adequate data sharing among stakeholders. These are some of the major issues that contribute to operational failures, adverse events, and medical errors. Several studies have also found that fragmented communication among healthcare stakeholders correlates to an increase in medical errors [5]. To establish a trend towards high reliability, the healthcare system began learning from the experiences of other high-risk domains and businesses, particularly the nuclear industry and aviation.

Root cause analysis of safety accidents is one approach and lesson learned from high-risk sectors that is now routinely employed in health care [6]. Proactive risk assessment tools (such as failure modes and consequences analysis) are now being used as well. Other lessons from high-risk industries include proactive risk management and a commitment to continual learning and development. In principle, these approaches have the ability to improve the safety records of healthcare organizations [7]. There have also been various technical developments that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve patient safety by automating procedures, enabling information sharing, minimizing variation in practice, intercepting possible errors, and improving clinical decisionmaking. Despite these significant efforts, there is still need for improvement in a variety of areas, including communication, incident reporting, and knowledge exchange among stakeholders [8]. Implementing an emerging technology such as blockchain, which allows decentralization, can help to alleviate data fragmentation and communication, a lack of effective and efficient data exchange, and inconsistent data storage and reporting in healthcare systems. Blockchain is a decentralized, unchangeable, and distributed record of transactions kept on a network of nodes distributed geographically [9]. Based on who can participate in the network and how transactions are validated, blockchain is characterized as public, private, or a consortium. Blockchains assure data trust, integrity, and verifiability by making each transaction auditable and permissionless. Data is also protected by encryption, which establishes the provenance of transactions and renders records tamper-evident [10]. This technique can also be viewed as a series of transactions that are sequentially added to the prior ones. This is accomplished by network participants who contribute to solving the cryptographic challenge, which improves the system's security against hostile modifications and frauds. In health care, blockchain technology can increase the security, trust, and transparency of medical data, processes, and transactions, and it is being actively researched as a potential tool to improve care delivery. Blockchain has numerous characteristics, such as data confidentiality and privacy, as well as autonomy, that can dramatically improve present healthcare systems.

Conclusion

Blockchain has various advantages, including an automated, decentralized, transparent, and immutable architecture that is useful for revolutionizing health care and improving patient safety. Blockchain technology's advantages, such as security, decentralization, traceability, and transparency, can greatly aid healthcare stakeholders in designing solutions to increase patient safety.

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