Making Healthcare Healthier With Blockchain
Coral Health & Dragonchain talk about old problems and new efficiencies in managing medical data.
The popular networking forum, Blockchain Seattle Meetups, took on the topic of healthcare, one of blockchain’s most important use case segments. Andy Park, Founder of Coral Health, a Vancouver based blockchain company, sat down with Dragonchain’s Zara Huang for a Q&A to discuss some real world examples of how blockchain is bringing new levels of efficiency and accuracy to this vital area.
So You Want Blockchain? But Do You Know Why?
Andy Park began the session with an observation that many organizations are rushing to blockchain, propelled by hype, without knowing exactly why it might be useful to them. The applications for blockchain, while wide ranging, are actually fairly specific in their nature, and the ability to hone in on that is an important first step for any organization.
‘[For the healthcare industry,]” says Park, “the answer is that blockchain solves the double spend problem.”
Solving the Double Spend Problem in Healthcare With Blockchain
The healthcare industry in the U.S. has long been characterized by an expensive, wasteful layer of bureaucracy spawned by the intersection of insurance companies, drug companies and regulation. The individual processes which make up that layer are mundane, routine and (often redundantly) repeated. The prescription of a controlled drug, for example, must be registered with multiple parties each time it is prescribed, from the patient’s insurer to the pharmacy, drug company and appropriate regulatory agencies. This makes for a lot of duplicated effort and organizational double spending.
It is these routine processes though, that provide the perfect sweet spot for blockchain. By utilizing a common, yet immutable ledger to access the same transaction, all parties can have access to the same set of verifications, without the redundancy or chance for error among separate databases. That data can then be used for future analysis, as well, to evaluate anything from sales data to reported results. Moreover, scarcity can then be appropriately applied to the data so it can be monetized, supplying a perfect use case to the blockchain’s solution to the “double spend” problem.
Citing Coral Health’s recent work in health data encryption and storage, Park recounts several instances of creating, “a relatively simple piece of code for a basic task that seems boring at first, but then would have all these other corollary uses.”
New Heights in Healthcare
Blockchain’s ability to help create a more efficient, responsive organization is driving healthcare companies to move beyond mere experimentation.
“Blockchain has moved from “theoretical” use cases to actual implementation in the field of healthcare,” said Eileen Quenin. “Coral Health has made great strides in patient management and is poised to contribute towards precision medicine research and pharmaceutical development by given controlled/secure access in the dissemination of medical data.”
“The Dragonchain and Blockchain Seattle Communities were knowledgeable and passionate about the potential of the blockchain” commented by Andy Park. “In particular, I was impressed with how technically savvy they were and how thoughtful their questions were regarding the various tradeoffs involved in applying the blockchain to healthcare.”
If you are interested in sponsoring and speaking at Blockchain Seattle Meetup, please send your inquiry to zara@dragonchain.com.
For any upcoming Meetups, check https://www.meetup.com/blockchain-seattle/
