Is There a Better Way to Provide Healthcare?
When we use the term blockchain, money usually comes to mind. There are so many easy opportunities to use blockchain to change finance, that perhaps the greatest future effect is being overlooked. Almost every nation on earth has at least some form of centralized healthcare, but the divergence of quality of service and information exchange is obvious to see. Enter the blockchain: a decentralized ledger of information that can’t be tampered with and is adaptable enough to take on many forms and functions.
The first apparent benefits are going to appear in the most developed and organized healthcare systems like in Western Europe and the United States, but that’s not to say that the blockchain couldn’t have huge effects on developing countries that aim to provide a better, more efficient level of service to its citizens.
For healthcare, the benefits are in providing a structure for storing health data, aiding research, improving the heathcare economy and in contributing to a much better privacy structure that has the ability to tie everything together in a neat little bow.
A New Health Economy
Imagine a seamless way to get healthcare providers, suppliers and the government all on the same track. Say there was a currency called healthcoin that acted as the fuel for a new health economy, one where inefficiency didn’t exist and that the end user (you) got the absolute best care for your share of the tax pile. This goes a long way to solving the issue of wonky insurance billing between insurers and providers by setting transparent price guidelines on the blockchain using something like a healthcoin then having insurance companies pay for treatment using this currency. Price transparency is immediately available on the public ledger, keeping track of who’s paying what for what treatment, ultimately smoothing out a major invoicing imbalance as seen in places like the United States. This could even work for semi-pubic healthcare systems where private companies supply treatment and medication to government institutions. You could take this one step further and ask doctors, newly equipped with a transparent history of healthcare transactions to bid on certain procedures, allowing the market to flex its ‘equality muscles’.
Privacy 2.0
The current argument against centralizing heath data has to do with privacy. Storing data in one place makes for the uneasy prospect of a data breach, risking the delicate information of millions of people. For this reason, the blockchain is the only way forward with a centralized ledger. By using blockchain technology, only the end user has access to an identifier key, yet everyone including doctors, hospitals, researchers and even the general public have access to the information stored on that key. This might seem scary until you realize that data is just data without a name to put to it, and in reality everyone’s a ‘John Smith’ in this system, changing the way we think about healthcare privacy. First, if we go back to the idea that only one person owns access to a private key, that person can choose specific instances in which to release their information, controlling access points and time frames. The exciting part comes when you consider the implications a non-private data system has for research. Because the end user’s personal information is no longer tied to their health record, access to data becomes universal, greatly leveraging the power of big data to solve major issues. You can even bolster this data with wearable tech, integrating popular fitness devices like fit bit to share health metrics without risk of a privacy breach.
This all might seem all too futuristic until you realize that the future is here. Estonia keeps all of its health records on a blockchain, among other citizen services. It’s only a handful of years before the benefits of such a system become too hard to ignore.
