Blockchain in healthcare — for the healthcare professional

TLDR; if you are a healthcare professional interested in or just simply curious about blockchain in healthcare (current and future state) follow my content here for:

• Ideal-state discussions for blockchain in the healthcare space,
• Current blockchain projects in healthcare and their use by patients,
• Guided analysis of public blockchain healthcare projects so you can learn to perform your own analysis for your organization,
• Standardized approaches to smart contract development in healthcare.

A bit of self-driven Google research on the topic of blockchain in healthcare will return a good amount of information (72,900,000 results to be exact). Most of this content is theoretical in nature, duplicative, and involves very few tested use-cases.

Do use cases exist? They do, although writing about them may not get a spike in short term attention, clicks, or hits. This is because the best use cases are those that involve accomplishing the simple things, not necessarily what is the most flashy. And blockchain certainly tries to be flashy.

This research will also tell you that blockchain within the healthcare space will experience a 8%+ CAGR over the next five years. Companies such as MediBloc, Patientory, Hashed Health, and Medicalchain are building public blockchain solutions designed for use by patients. The most common description of the service provided by these solutions is that they ‘give patients control over their medical data’. This approach is based on making the patient a steward of their own data (a data-DPOA of sorts) so that they can approve or deny requests to access and/or view their data for the purpose of medical decisions or rendering of services.

Interesting concept, but I am going to venture a guess that you may be thinking the following… ‘for patient health equity this is amazing, but what about clinical care delivery and outcomes?’

Whether we like it or not, blockchain is a reality in healthcare today…not tomorrow. These solutions are accessible by our patients right now.

As a healthcare professional who is interested in technology innovations that improve patient experience I believe that there are opportunities for blockchain to be disruptive (more on why in a moment, but first a little background about me).

My early healthcare operations career was spent in post-acute care where I found myself bouncing from segment-to-segment during my undergraduate studies interested in learning about each POS (SNF, HH, O&P) and what it does. A take-it-apart approach to learning about how healthcare is delivered after a hospital stay if you will.

I ate it up and loved it.

This experience led me to working for a successful multistate MSSP ACO leading growth and practice engagement before moving on to payer operations. My career contract with myself is still evergreen — I am still learning.

So, why do I believe blockchain technology can improve healthcare?

Because (to toot my own horn) I spent 17 years actively learning the care continuum and all of it’s shortcomings. This includes learning about how risk bearing entities are affected along the way — and what they need to be successful. I am also a blockchain developer…

In recent years, my evergreen contract with myself has directed me to learn how to create blockchain solutions. I am a certified smart contract developer and security auditor. Additionally, I am pursuing a second masters degree in Health Informatics and Analytics for the sole purpose of studying how public blockchain solutions might integrate with health information systems.

Am I trying to brag or impress you the reader? No.

I am trying to impress upon you that going forward I will be your trusted colleague and resource for useful information about blockchain in healthcare.

No hype, no unvetted use-case flash, no BS — my future content here on Medium will focus on the following as I believe it provides the highest level of value to you as a healthcare professional…

• Ideal-state discussions for blockchain in the healthcare space,
• Current blockchain projects in healthcare and their use by patients,
• Guided analysis of public blockchain healthcare projects so you can learn to perform an analysis for your organization,
• Standardized approaches to smart contract development in healthcare.

Thank you for reading and I look forward to our learning together!