US healthcare organizations are turning to blockchain.

Healthcare officials recognized the potential of blockchain technology.

The US healthcare industry has started to show great interest in blockchain technology, especially after cyber attacks on medical research institutions working on the COVID-19 vaccine.

According to DevPro Magazine, healthcare organizations believe that the use of blockchain technology can provide data security against cyberattacks and hackers. Using this technology, users can only access data using very complex access keys. For this reason, they think that ransomware and similar attacks are preventable.

Healthcare organizations believe blockchain can provide a certain degree of data protection to resist hacker attacks. They also noted that patients would have many other benefits, such as providing secure and full access to their global medical records. The idea of implementing blockchain technology in healthcare institutions has become clear with the increase in cyber attacks on healthcare institutions in the last two years. In 2018, a healthcare institution suffered multiple cyberattacks, resulting in access to medical records of more than 15 million patients. DevPro Journal announced that the number of cyberattacks increased by 60% in 2019 compared to previous years. Will the Healthcare Sector Adapt to Blockchain?

There are many obstacles to the use of blockchain technology in the health sector, the adoption of the system is among the top problems, and there is also the problem of blockchain compliance.

The first issue is that all organizations involved in patient care and medical research need to support this new blockchain technology and move to a collaborative information exchange model. The second problem is that it is still difficult for the blockchain to process large amounts of data in a single operation such as MRI images, CAT scans, and even genome sequences. The third problem is that the blockchain does not delete deleted or modified records. Instead, other blocks must be added to the chain to perform data deletions and updates.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was one of the first countries to recognize the potential of blockchain technology in the healthcare industry. The FDA collaborated with IBM Watson in 2017 to develop a secure medical record data exchange using blockchain.

Another company, eMQT, opened its "Biomedical Blockchain Research Center" in 2018 to evaluate its own medical research plans and partnerships. The center used blockchain technology to examine the DNA sequencing results of thousands of Africans suffering from cellular diseases.

As can be seen from many such examples, blockchain technology is developing rapidly by producing smart solutions in the healthcare sector and bringing innovations to the sector.