Reports said that nonfungible tokens (NFTs) will have a vast impact on society. Given this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the trillion-dollar healthcare sector has begun to explore NFTs tokens to advance medicine.
It has been reported that blockchain technology can play an increasingly important role within the healthcare sector. This was recently highlighted in a report from the European Union Blockchain Observatory, which specifically documents how blockchain applications can solve challenges facing the healthcare industry.
However, the paper notes that patient engagement and transparency of how data is stored, along with the effective distribution of knowledge and data remains problematic for the healthcare sector. Yet, as the blockchain space continues to advance, tokenization in the form of nonfungible tokens may serve as a solution to many of the challenges facing today’s healthcare industry.
The report said that for those unfamiliar with the term, precision medicine refers to “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person,” according to the Precision Medicine Initiative.
Likewise, Cao believes that tokenizing genetic profiles can help patients maintain data ownership and transparency into their insights while receiving many benefits that are not typically associated with traditional genomic testing.
He said:
“This may be one of the most important NFT applications in the world. Our genetic profile is unique and it should be represented by an NFT. GeneNFTs are the tokenized ownership of one’s genetic data. This enables each of us to truly take control and benefit from our data contribution.”
According to Cao, traditional genetic testing companies like 23andMe, for example, rely on intermediaries to collect patient data for research. As such, users must trust centralized entities to safely store sensitive health information.
Thus, users do not receive any incentives for opting to share their data with third parties. Yet, tokenizing genomic data in the form of an NFT has the potential to transform this model entirely.
Source: Cointelegraph
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