Powering the Next Generation of Healthcare Through Blockchain Technology

Published by Daniel Chui, Search and Evaluation Digital Health

How Crypto’s best friend is removing friction, increasing accuracy and promoting access, fairness and trust in the healthcare sphere

With major announcements that CVS and Aetna are merging, Walmart’s interested in acquiring Humana, and Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan are collaborating on healthcare, there’s ample evidence to suggest that the industry is due for monumental disruption. This is true from not only a business perspective, but also a technological one, and blockchain is near, if not at, the top of the list of disruptive opportunities.

So, what is blockchain? In layman’s terms, it is a public and secure ledger that contains verified transactions between two parties, made possible by decentralizing the ledger so that it not owned and regulated by a single entity. Awarded the Medical Futurist’s ‘buzzword of 2018,’ blockchain technology is equal parts utility and hype, to the extent that Gartner believes it has reached the Peak of Inflated Expectations, and is soon to enter the Trough of Disillusionment. On the former, according to a recent Black Book survey, 98% of respondents from managed care plans with more than half a million members are either actively deploying or investigating the option to deploy blockchain technology. Despite this intense interest in the technology, Healthcare IT News writes that the technology will have to address some barriers to adoption, including interoperating within a fragmented healthcare space, figuring out monetization, and integrating the technology within a sea of preexisting regulations. It won’t be for another few years that we’ll see the technology go mainstream, passing from the Trough of Disillusionment to reach the Plateau of Productivity.

In the meantime, as blockchain makes its journey to mainstream adoption, there are several opportunities for blockchain to make a difference in healthcare in the near term. Here are some use cases:

1. Russian firm SkyChain Global recently announced the results of an initial test of a blockchain tool which uses artificial intelligence to filter through diagnoses and spot inconsistencies. At a tenth of a second per diagnosis, the system was able to lower the overall rate of incorrect diagnoses from a human margin of error between 18–22% down to 4–14%.
2. The MediLedger project, launched in 2017 by Chronicled, is designed to provide an open, blockchain framework for better managing the supply chains of pharmaceuticals to ensure enhanced regulatory compliance and safety.
3. Doc.AI is a platform that leverages blockchains, natural language processing and computer vision to generate insights from accessible medical data and securely relay it back to the user. In generating a profile for each individual user, the platform enables more effective precision medication, and offered quantifiable information for doctors to work with.
4. Blockpharma is a French startup that uses blockchain-based technologies to fight drug counterfeiting in developing countries in Asia, Africa and South America, which comprise between 10 to 30 percent of the total medicines on sale in the world. By improving drug traceability, the company is able to reduce the 800,000 deaths experienced globally due to counterfeit drugs.

These examples play to blockchain’s strength for enabling and verifying transactions to the extent that in the future, I expect that blockchain will enable industry consolidation, collectively working off of a common patient database. As a tool, the technology affords easy access to information, administrative budget control, security of crucial data and transparency to all parties involved, and better collaboration between parties. Consequently, it’s easy to see why $2.1 billion will be spent on blockchain solutions in 2018, with 42.8 percent yearly growth between now and 2022 according to VCCircle.

“Blockchain technology will fundamentally change how payers and providers share claims information, how provider data is updated and matriculated through a network, how a patient’s medical records are shared and updated as she moves through the care continuum (from a primary care provider, to a specialist, to a pharmacist), how population health data is aggregated and analyzed, how clinical trial data is recorded, and how prescription drugs are tracked and monitored through the supply chain”

~EY 2016 White Paper

In my opinion, these trends and examples are great indicators that we’re in for some exciting times in digital healthcare. From machine and deep learning to virtual reality and blockchain, the industry is embracing innovative technologies to help transform the future of care. While it’s still early to tell with blockchain, it could very well be the groundbreaking platform that will help break down some of the challenges that the industry has previously faced.