Over the past few years, several industries have discovered the benefits of incorporating blockchain technology into their day-to-day operations, and the healthcare industry is no exception.
Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Health Care Service Corporation, and Sentara have joined IBM’s blockchain health utility network initiative, which aims to find out how blockchain can address the industry’s barriers to sharing data quickly and efficiently. This coalition of big names in healthcare hopes to ultimately be able to better serve customers once issues like redundancy, trust, security, transparency, and data accuracy have been mitigated.
There are a few different ways blockchain could improve our healthcare systems, but it seems to be most effective for better digital recordkeeping and simplifying communication between doctors and hospitals, and their patients.
Up-to-Date Directories
Even in the age of the internet, keeping healthcare provider directories up-to-date has proven to be difficult, but blockchain could make it much simpler. A permissioned blockchain could more easily keep track of healthcare providers’ specialties, credentials, and any other necessary information. When provider information is updated in one place, it would be automatically updated universally across all areas of the blockchain.
Using blockchain for this purpose would also decrease the operational cost of keeping directories updated while keeping the information secure.
Electronic Health Records
Transferring electronic health records between healthcare providers has always been an arduous and time-consuming task, however, having that information available on the blockchain would make that process simpler and quicker.
An article published by Forbes quoted Sentara’s senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer, Mike Reagin, as saying, “Blockchain is poised to help solve some of healthcare’s most crucial data security, and IT interoperability issues as we look to implement new customer-centric healthcare delivery models.”
With these new delivery models, patients would have more control over their medical history data and would be able to manage and understand that data more easily.
Putting electronic health records on the blockchain would also allow patients to be assigned an identifier code so that a patient’s data will always be linked to their identifier, making it much harder for doctor’s offices to mismatch records.
Tracking Medication
In addition to medical history data being shared through blockchain, information on medications could also be stored and transferred via the blockchain to keep track of prescriptions, recognize stolen or counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and openly share the results of clinical trials.
Payment Processing
A blockchain-based universal payment system could simplify the process of paying for medical care and processing health insurance claims. Patients would be able to monitor payments and claims in real-time and possibly automate them as well.
The following short video from IBM further details how blockchain technology can be harnessed to create a better healthcare payment system:
Additional Reading
Read more about how blockchain is being utilized by the healthcare industry on IBM’s Blockchain Blog.
