Rebooting Healthcare Industry with Blockchain — Hashed Health on Epicenter
The healthcare industry is full of paradoxes — while treatment technologies represent some of the most advanced science known to humankind, most of the administrative tasks are still performed using paper and fax machine. Moreover, as diagnosis, treatment, and care become increasingly data-driven, the industry is looking to adopt more secure and robust technologies to manage data and communications between the patient and various supply chain parties. Read on to find out how a Nashville-based healthcare innovation firm — Hashed Health — has been working to transform and improve the healthcare industry with blockchain.
John Bass and Corey Todaro dedicated their careers to building technological solutions solving some of the most important challenges facing the healthcare sector. John has been trying to increase collaboration within the industry with the help of technology, while Corey is a veteran of working with data systems inside of healthcare companies. In Hashed Health, both are now focused on building products that address the unmet needs in the healthcare sector. John and Corey see a great potential in blockchain to provide solutions for this complicated industry with lots of players and complex workflows. “Blockchain is really compelling due to being a unique system for generating behaviour for all the system participants, instead of just extracting value from the players” says John.
John and Corey have been working in the US but they do identify common problems across healthcare provision globally. Every healthcare economy consists of payers — government, individuals and providers — who deliver services and products. The healthcare industry globally is very much concerned with cost containment, as we are dealing with conditions more and more expensive to treat and to control, while longer lifespans and lifestyles are leading to higher and higher healthcare costs.
In the US in particular, John and Corey identify several core challenges. First of all, the healthcare sector has always been behind the curve especially in terms of administrative technology. The administrative burdens and inefficiencies abound — the administrative costs of healthcare in the US can represent up to one-third of the total cost of care. In addition, there is a real pricing problem with healthcare services and huge variation in costs of procedures. “We have designed a system based on claims infrastructure and volume-based reward that incentives people to overuse and oversubscribe and overcast”, says Corey. One of the key things Hashed Health is working on is addressing those specific inefficiencies and applying blockchain technology to those cost-saving opportunities. “Blockchain is very good at exposing who is adding value to the value chain, and we are excited about promoting solutions that are returning value to the consumer”, says John.
Hashed Health is focused on designing an economy specifically for healthcare — their efforts are centered around three different areas. Hashed Collective is a community building organisation bringing together various stakeholders potential collaborators and investors in the healthcare industry, providing a neutral forum for discussion. Hashed Health Labs is a product development shop comprised of a team of full-time blockchain developers who focus on bringing the best protocols to a given use case. Finally, Hashed Enterprise works directly with healthcare enterprises interested in understanding and deploying blockchain-based solutions.
One of the products successfully developed by Hashed Health is Professional Credentials Exchange — a sort of KYC system for credentialing physicians. This blockchain-based solution allows parties to define and exchange identity and doctors’ credentials assets using the data, rules, and validation checks — replacing a 30–45 day long and predominantly paper-based process of faxing artefacts between hospitals. “We think we can significantly reduce the cycle time in this multiparty workflow, thanks to the blockchain trust layer, to enable physicians to get to practice faster. We can bring it down substantially, up to 1 day”, says John. Apart from Professional Credentials Exchange, Hashed Health has been focused on developing Bramble, an Ethereum-based platform for converting health services to digital health assets using smart contracts.
If you want to find out more about Hashed Health and applying blockchain solutions in healthcare in general — check out the Hashed Health podcasts.
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