Ten years versus eleven months. That difference can seem like an eternity while you’re waiting for a solution to treat or prevent a condition. In contrast to the typical ten-year vaccine development procedure, scientists who created the COVID vaccine in less than a year represent a significant medical advancement. The accelerated research and development stage demonstrated to the world how swiftly the procedure could go if provided with the necessary resources.
Here, better data was crucial. Collaborations around data have actually saved lives.
In contrast to the customary lengthy process for retrieving reliable and high-quality data, researchers were able to access vast amounts of information on previous vaccines to cut the schedule by years. In return, the medical profession treated hundreds of millions of individuals with life-saving procedures. The question now is how to apply what we discovered from the COVID data to broaden the scope of medical innovation and transform healthcare. The healthcare industry is currently looking for a solution to provide safe, real-time data sharing and retrieval to researchers.
To guide their research and deliver vital patient care, scientists and medical professionals require high-quality, reliable data. But the data systems used in healthcare are slow, ineffective, and non-standardized. It is getting harder and harder to retrieve medical data. You are aware of the significance of longitudinal data if you have ever conducted a scientific experiment or examined business financials. Medical longitudinal data can map the optimal course of action for present or future therapies to advance care and, ultimately, save patient lives by revealing trends across time. One of the most powerful resources for improving care is healthcare data, yet regulations and privacy laws are frequently cited as justifications for limiting access. Patients suffer without answers to their health conditions and clinicians lack a longitudinal view of the patient’s journey to understand the complete picture of their health.
Researchers also lack knowledge and understanding that might help to treat or cure diseases. Secure, authentic, and real-time data could revolutionise the medical industry. Instead, the business seems to come up with workarounds to the problems in order to provide a response, even if it is inaccurate.
Real patients are waiting for real solutions, while some researchers are looking for a cure using fake data. Synthetic data is more accessible and easier to distribute, but it is not a realistic representation of patients in the real world, giving researchers less accurate and trustworthy datasets. Even if the numbers seem precise, they are nevertheless manufactured by computers to resemble real-world facts.
Security is a serious issue with medical data. Data obtained from healthcare providers can be surprisingly insecure, despite the need to protect patient data. Many institutions lack the storage space necessary to keep decades’ worth of patient records on their computers. Simply put, a large infrastructure is required to store that amount of data. Hospitals frequently choose to outsource their data to external servers or the cloud in order to address the issue of data storage. These technologies put users’ privacy at risk and are susceptible to cyberattacks, which could result in unauthorised parties getting a patient’s medical records. Better healthcare data would have countless advantages, yet the sector still has trouble getting it right. Live and high-quality data lead to better care for patients. Live data gives researchers the most current information at their fingertips, showing trends that they may miss or falsely identify with older data sets. It offers a faster understanding of diseases and a faster time to medicine.
The better care that medical professionals can provide depends on how much they know about diseases and their patients. However, the industry has restricted access to data out of concern for privacy issues, making it challenging to comprehend a patient’s complete history or provide insights. Decentralized architecture and blockchain are the answers to the data problem. With the help of technology, a rapid and safe platform for data interchange is now possible, giving researchers a comprehensive picture of a patient’s health throughout time.
The risk of privacy breaches can be completely eliminated thanks to new collaborative approaches that allow for the safest possible data retrieval and exchange. Simply said, blockchain technology is impregnable in the healthcare industry. The power of research will be shifted into the hands of scientists so they may actively save lives through data partnerships that offer an open data interchange with high-quality, private, secure, and compliant data. Instead of waiting months, researchers looking for extensive datasets can get them in only a few hours. We learned from the pandemic that rapid medical advancement can save lives. Data is the foundation of medical innovation, and data has the potential to lead to a revolution in healthcare.
