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A startling 251,000 Americans die every year due to medical errors; this number makes medical errors the third major cause of death in the US, right behind cancer and heart disease.

Despite all the advancements in healthcare, this statistic shows that doctors can still struggle (a lot) in figuring out what illness a patient is suffering from. Certainly, a portion of this figure can be owed to negligence, but a vast portion of these errors occur due to inability to conclude the proper course of treatment. Clearly, efforts need to be made to improve this startling statistic.

Shivom, a new blockchain project that allows secure storage of genomic data and also a marketplace where genomic data can be sold, could provide an important means to lower medical errors.

Shivom Could Help Reduce Medical Errors

Data is an important resource utilized by companies in almost every industry, and one of its key utilities is for reducing errors. The healthcare industry is utilizing data, but not as much as it could; additionally, some forms of data are simply hard to get access to.

Genomic data, can be particularly difficult to access and there are limited channels to access the genomic data that does exist in the market. Shivom makes it possible for people to have DNA sequenced and then provides a means to securely store the information. Then the platform provides the users to have control of who can access the information; it even allows them to sell this data.

First off, since the platform allows users to control who can access this information, it can create a cross-border reach of biological information of any individual. Of course, it offers a great opportunity to allow anyone to provide detailed information to their typical healthcare provider, but it allows you to easily head to different healthcare facility and seamlessly give the healthcare provider a complete grasp of what you’re made of—from a biological perspective. This even empowers users to yield the benefit if they’re in a new country. With access to such important biological data of a person, the medical industry will have the power to make guided decisions, and this is particularly important when healthcare providers face key medical decisions on new patients. This seamless availability of important information will empower healthcare providers to lower the occurrences of medical errors.

This technology will have a major benefit when patients interact with their general healthcare provider. It will empower those healthcare providers to develop treatments that are precisely optimized for the needs of particular patients. However, on the point of reducing medical errors, this technology will allow healthcare providers to have access to a long-term DNA-cored analysis of their patients, thereby giving them an in-depth grasp of the best means to treat their patients. This too can have a major impact on the effort to reduce medical errors.

You Pay for Medical Errors

The problems caused by medical error go beyond just deaths. Medical errors also cost billions of dollars. Not all medical errors lead to a death, but the treatments to counter the errors can be extremely costly. And those costs are primarily passed on to Medicare. So, ironically (and sadly), taxpayers are paying for footing the bill of medical errors.

Medical Errors are the cause of a staggeringly high amount of deaths, and they are also an extremely expensive burden on taxpayers. Shivom makes genomic data available to healthcare providers and that could potentially make a major impact in the effort to reduce medical errors.