2 Ways Blockchain Can Drive Innovation Forward In Health
Transparency, traceability, security, and interoperability have never been more critical to healthcare. Through blockchain, some of healthcare’s biggest problems have the potential to be solved.
Blockchain, a distributed ledger, is immutable, secure and decentralized across a chain of computers. The blockchain represents a network consensus of transactions and records anything of value such as titles of ownership, certificates, and money. The technology is faster than traditional methods, has lower costs and removes friction between parties.
In 2017, the blockchain space saw prolific growth largely due to investments in bitcoin and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Although interest in Blockchain and its applications are trending up and to the right, the actual use cases and adoption have been slow, especially in health. The barrier to entering health care from a technological perspective is high. Managing sensitive patient data, tracking drugs through the supply chain, and the integration of technology into and across computing devices is really hard, but it doesn’t have to be with blockchain. Below are two areas where blockchain adoption can be increased to further drive innovation forward in health:
Intermediary Workflow Support
The Internet enables businesses and people to share information in astonishing ways. However, it is quite difficult to store or transfer information without a powerful intermediary. In the financial sector, intermediaries, like banks or governments, are slow, threaten privacy, and exclude large groups of people they can’t profit from. In health, intermediaries are vital to connecting the online world with the offline, and to ultimately saving lives. Blockchain will compliment the intermediaries jobs, not invalidate their roles. In What Blockchain Can’t Do, MIT Sloan School of Management professors, Catherine Tucker and Christian Catalini, advocate that a human is still needed to verify the link between digital records and physical objects:
“At the interface between the offline world and its digital representation, the usefulness of the technology still critically depends on trusted intermediaries to effectively bridge the “last mile” between a digital record and a physical individual, business, device, or event.”
It’s still early days for blockchain, but its impact on the interconnectedness of data and digital platforms used every day will be transformed forever.
Partnerships In Biomedical Research
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare (INGH) opened the Center for Biomedical Blockchain Research this past year. The ambitious venture and the first of its kind at any academic medical center is led by Joel Dudley, PhD, Executive Vice President of Precision Health and Director of INGH, along with Noah Zimmerman, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Director of the Health Data and Design Innovation Center.
The center is reimagining how Mount Sinai works programmatically with companies looking to develop blockchain solutions that address problems in both clinical medicine and biomedical research.
“We expect that some early use cases could emerge from areas where existing systems and approaches fall short. The fragmented nature of regional and global healthcare systems prevents the flow of vital information and creates barriers to access for underserved groups. We see the potential for blockchain and related technologies to enable applications that support more unified healthcare ecosystems and serve the greater goals of realizing national and global precision health networks.” — Dr. Joel Dudley, Executive Vice President for Precision Health for the Mount Sinai Health System
Equipped with a database of 144 companies, the center’s staff will conduct academic research on blockchain in medicine; create their own prototype blockchain networks; and develop predictive health applications using information from electronic health records, wearable devices, and other digital sources. There are a variety of different ways blockchain can be applied to health, but unless this academic research is conducted on the best uses, the technology will be adrift, not evidencing any purpose or goal.
All stakeholders in the healthcare industry “should be looking at blockchain as an immense opportunity to make every part of the life cycle better — for sponsors, service producers, supply chain, and, most importantly, patients,” Mohamad Zahreddine, CIO at TrialAssure, said in a recent Forbes article. Blockchain’s decentralized, distributed, and secure database will work for the health system in ways we’ve never seen before, especially for those faced with social inequities and whose primary care needs have been most excluded.
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The Mount Sinai Co-Lab is an open innovation program designed to find solutions to healthcare challenges that have the potential to impact health globally. Solving tomorrow’s healthcare challenges requires today’s preeminent organizations to interface with healthcare systems in ways that they haven’t needed to in the past. The Co-Lab fosters long-term partnership between preeminent organizations and Mount Sinai’s forward-thinking leadership, faculty, and students. Participating organizations are matched with a navigator, a Connector-In-Residence across the Mount Sinai Health System that helps hone in on nodes of value and activate the right Mount Sinai resources to optimize partnership.
