How Blockchain Applications are Impacting Supply Chain, Healthcare, and Finance

Steam engines, electricity, and microchips were the drivers of the first three industrial revolutions. The fourth industrial revolution is around the corner, but what will be the impetus this time?

If you ask experts, one of the answers you’ll get will be blockchain. Even though blockchain technology is still in its infancy, it has captivated the minds of industry leaders around the world.

You must have heard of Bitcoin, it’s on the news, social media, and now even President Trump has launched his own cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is merely the first mainstream application; the technology behind it is blockchain.

Advanced healthcare technology, finance, and supply chain management are the three most promising use cases of blockchain applications beyond cryptocurrencies.

This article will further elaborate on the impact of blockchain on these three vital industries.

What Exactly is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a digital ledger that records transactions across a network of computers. However, unlike traditional ledgers, there is no central authority in a blockchain network. It is a decentralized network where no single participant has control over the entire system.

Bitcoin works on this principle, which is why it is great for preventing fraud and securing critical information.

Every transaction is grouped into a block, which is connected to other blocks, forming a chain of blocks, hence the name blockchain.

In this way, new data is added to a chain and it’s extremely difficult to make any changes to it.

Exploring Uses of Blockchain in Healthcare, Finance, and Supply Chain

Blockchain use cases span into machine learning solutions, cloud infrastructure management, and many more. But advanced healthcare technology, finance, and supply chains have the most potential to benefit from blockchain applications. Let’s explore how.

1. Blockchain in Healthcare: Bringing Advanced Healthcare Technology

The primary use case of blockchain in healthcare solutions relates to patient privacy and data security. Safeguarding confidential patient data is not only an ethical practice but also a legal requirement. More and more countries are legislating stringent data privacy laws in healthcare technology.

Furthermore, hospitals and medical facilities are now increasingly relying on managed cloud services for data management. As a result, cloud security solutions must be foolproof.

Blockchain can solve many of these data privacy problems by incorporating patient data in a decentralized network. This way, patient data can be stored safely and shared with proper access control over the cloud.

Moreover, healthcare providers can also devise custom healthcare solutions with blockchain, which is very beneficial for clinical trials where data needs to be specific and precise.

2. Blockchain in Finance: Shaping the Future

Apart from advanced healthcare technology, blockchain is going to change the way our financial services operate. The prospect of blockchain-based advanced healthcare technology products is there, but it still requires some years to materialize.

However, we have already seen the impact of blockchain in finance with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is just a glimpse of how blockchain can be used to move value and assets. The most important application of blockchain in the financial world is smart contracts.

Smart contracts don’t require any outside input to initiate transactions. They are automatically stipulated once the predefined conditions are met.

Unambiguity in smart contracts reduces the chances of money manipulation to zero, and money manipulation is at the heart of many of the world’s ills.

It might be possible that further advancements in blockchain will do to financial services, just as email did to postal services! Who knows? Only time will tell.

3. Blockchain in Supply Chain: Better and Faster Management

Supply chains are a complex network of manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, and customers. Moreover, they can all be stretched across different parts of the world. The iPhone you bought online was designed in the U.S, manufactured in China, assembled in India and delivered to your doorstep.

In supply chain management, maintaining visibility across the entire network as goods move from one location to another is extremely difficult.

Blockchain can vastly improve the efficiency of anything that can be conceived of as a supply chain. It doesn’t matter if it’s managing financial information or data from advanced healthcare technology solutions.

It creates a secure and transparent network that tracks goods real time at every stage of the supply chain. Additionally, it also maintains data integrity as all parties can access the product data in real-time.

Conclusion

With the internet and blockchain, everything is going to change. Blockchain has all the signs of a paradigm-shifting technology: disrupting existing systems, solving long-standing problems, niche and clunky in the start, and creating new markets.

The potential of advanced healthcare technology, finance, and supply chains is just one side of the picture. Blockchain will eventually be everywhere, and the world will have to adjust.

It might be possible everything will be connected to a blockchain one day!

Every informed person should know about it. It has enormous value for general users, industry leaders, and researchers.