For medical SEO services to keep serving hospitals, nursing homes and physician clinics effectively, they need to keep discovering new technologies and trends that could have a bearing on their SEO strategies. And blockchain is one such disruptive technology that could potentially influence many areas of healthcare, not just search engine optimization.
The Disruptor that Blockchain Is
Blockchain is a great disruptor of industries; we’re only beginning to grasp its potential. Blockchain came to the limelight with the bitcoin cryptocurrency founded by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Blockchain was conceived to manage the circulation and use of bitcoins. It functions as bitcoin’s public ledger. With blockchain, bitcoin is able to overcome the problem of double spending in spite of the absence of a trusted authority to govern the currency transactions. And this blockchain technology has led to other cryptocurrencies cropping up.
Blockchain Can Help Improve Healthcare
Can blockchain really improve healthcare? For starters, one area it can really help is in storing medical records in the blockchain, making it secure and free from hackers. Blockchain has already proved its resourcefulness in recording cryptocurrency transactions, and can therefore be employed in healthcare too for securing medical records. To say that records are important in healthcare is a massive understatement. Not only is the data important, it is also sensitive. So it needs to be free from any kind of discrepancies and inaccuracies.
The responsibility of maintaining these records currently lies with healthcare professionals. And the records can only be accessed by certain authorized people. That makes accessing and retrieving the data quickly in times of emergency harder and time consuming. That’s because healthcare providers all have various systems for storing their patients’ medical information. With blockchain, accessibility doesn’t become a problem and, since it is so easily accessible, any tampering will become clearly evident.
An Example of How Blockchain Can Help in Patient Records
Here’s why blockchain technology could become indispensable. Take the example of prescription records. If hackers get hold of the prescription information of patients and tamper with it, patients could have their health information altered. That could have an effect on the treatment being provided to the individual. Information about patients’ prescription is usually compiled by different entities including pharmacies and hospitals. And since each of these entities maintains its own database, there are chances of discrepancies.
With prescription blockchain, you can deal with the problems arising from having varied records and systems. Blockchain could serve as a trusted and shared source of the patient’s prescription information. Healthcare providers can get an immediate and accurate view of the past and present medications prescribed for the patient, all of which contributes to better and more efficient treatment. If blockchain is introduced, healthcare is revolutionized.
What Blockchain’s Potential Impact on SEO Could Be
Blockchain can have a major impact on search engine optimization (SEO) as well, though it may not be quite evident how. And that means it has a bearing on the online marketing and SEO efforts of your medical practice or hospital.
When companies and even hospitals begin widely using blockchain, it needs to be integrated within their websites. The web developers will need to work with the SEOs for securing search benefits and displaying the data from the transactions made through blockchain. Again, this could bring about more opportunities as well as technical issues for which SEOs will need to collaborate with developers. There could also be compatibility issues as a result of the various website platforms and content management systems involved. Search Engine Land reports that the Schema people have already begun working on the Markup required for the user ID profiles and blockchain certificates.
But with an advanced and trustworthy healthcare SEO company working for you, you don’t need to worry too much about the consequences of blockchain, but just focus on what you do best – rendering care. There is a major revolution blockchain could bring about in healthcare and medical SEO, but experienced healthcare digital marketing companies would have already begun to plan for it.
