The blockchain is slowly but surely making its way to the healthcare industry. As per Healthcare Rallies for Blockchain, a study from IBM 16% of surveyed healthcare executives responded to have solid plans to implement a commercial blockchain solution this year, while 56% expected to do so by 2020. The entire healthcare industry is grappling with what’s possible now and what blockchain could solve in the future.

To disrupt healthcare in the future, blockchain is being looked at as a technology that would be to solve many issues that plague the industry today to create a common database of health information that doctors and providers could access no matter what electronic medical system they used, higher security and privacy, less admin time for doctors so there’s more time to spend on patient care, and even better sharing of research results to facilitate new drug and treatment therapies for disease.

Medical Data Management is one key implementation of blockchain technology in healthcare. MedRec, one prototype using blockchains, is one such implementation which is intended to improve electronic medical records and allow patients’ records to be accessed securely by any provider who needs it solving the waste of time, money and duplication in procedures. Medrec’s goal is to give patients and their providers one-stop access to their entire medical history across all providers they have ever seen and enable them to grant access to their personal medical records to researchers anonymously, which could make medical breakthroughs possible faster than they are now. This pioneer in the field shows the potential for how dramatically things could change in healthcare by deploying blockchains.

The coming years will see an exhaustive implementation of blockchain technology in the healthcare domain. While being tested and vetted on how it can better support healthcare industry’s operations while future applications in blockchains will inevitably be discovered along the way.