Solutions to the Healthcare Industry’s Woes Lie in Blockchain Technology
Blockchain Buzz is debuting on the Lisk Blog this week. This series will highlight and investigate different industries that are making real moves towards the adoption of blockchain technology. The first article of the series explores blockchain in healthcare.
The benefits of blockchain technology are expected to reach and transform a number of industries, ranging from agribusiness to real estate. However, it is fair to say that one industry in particular is rapidly moving towards adoption of the technology — healthcare. As the Lisk Academy points out in its comprehensive section dedicated to Blockchain in Healthcare, “the industry is one of the most proactive and excited about switching to a blockchain healthcare system with over a quarter of stakeholders surveyed by the research company Deloitte disclosing an investment of over $5 million or more into the space.”
Not only is the healthcare industry antiquated, the issues surrounding the bureaucratic red tape that plague the industry are also cumbersome. There exists poor interoperability and a lack of proper data management and analytics.
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs published a news brief this month stating the need for more and trustworthy data as “accurate data is the lifeblood of good policy and decision-making,” according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Earlier this month at the HIMSS18 conference in Las Vegas, one of the most important conferences in the world for health information and technology, Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Google, discussed the current state of the healthcare industry and why it desperately needs to utilize innovation. “We’re in the Stone Age now” as “80% of referrals and insurance interactions seem to be done by fax,” he cited. In addition, doctors spend “two hours of admin time for every one hour in front of the patient…no wonder 50% of the physicians report burnout,” he said. Schmidt cited another problem as “alert fatigue — they’ve got so many different systems that are not particularly integrated that all these alerts are going on.” The plethora of benefits associated with data analysis cannot be tapped without the use of innovative technologies that are available to us.
Schmidt referenced previously unthinkable innovations such as email, the internet and smartphones, calling for a “killer app” to change the industry as we know it. As HealthcareITNews summarized, what it will take is “a clinical data warehouse packed with diverse data sets that are curated and normalized such that sophisticated analytics can be run against the data and accessed with a rich API.”
It’s easy to imagine that this “killer app” will make use of blockchain technology: a decentralized system incentivizes convergence on a single standard, making it easier for data consumers to interact with data from diverse suppliers.
There are a number of blockchain technology companies working to improve data exchange. For example, Berlin-based Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol working to make data universally available for applications in AI and much more.
As one can imagine, blockchain for healthcare was a hot topic at HIMSS18. During a panel titled “Blockchain 4 Healthcare: Fit for Purpose?” industry experts including the likes of Tim Mackey, director of the Global Health Policy Institute at UC San Diego, and Health Linkages CEO Robert Barkovich discussed the natural applicability of blockchain in their industry. According to an article by HealthcareITNews, Tim Mackey stated that “some of the core principles of blockchain apply to healthcare,” and “this immutable distributed ledger can better ensure the resilience and provenance, traceability and management of healthcare data.” Barkovich added that “blockchain lets us agree on history, even if we don’t all agree or trust each other” and “there’s no need for a trusted third party — it’s all there in the chain.” He explained “by its very nature, blockchain is well-positioned to be part of a solution to many problems in healthcare.” Blockchain technology supports interoperability and seamless exchange of health information.
One company present at the conference, TrustedHealth, a blockchain-based specialized medicine digital ecosystem for physicians and patients, is “completely digitizing and decentralizing the healthcare process on the blockchain” with a focus on life-threatening and rare diseases. They hope to enable patients to receive the correct information regarding their condition by connecting them with the specialists they need. As the healthcare news outlet stated, TrustedHealth “enables virtual conversations and knowledge sharing while simultaneously gathering Big Data to be used to further research into specific conditions.”
To learn more about blockchain use cases for healthcare, please read the Lisk Academy’s comprehensive section addressing this.
Developers and health professionals are not the only ones who understand the implications of blockchain technology for the healthcare sector; investors are taking notice too and pumping a great deal of money into healthcare-focused blockchain companies. In January, San Francisco-based startup Akiri, which runs a blockchain-based network-as-a-service platform for the healthcare industry, scored $10 million in funding from Health2047. Health2047 is an innovation enterprise developing and commercializing solutions for data liquidity, chronic care, productivity, security, and payments for the healthcare industry. The American Medical Association (AMA) is one of the founding members of the enterprise.
Just this month, Millennium Blockchain, a US-based diversified holding company focusing on blockchain technologies and crypto-assets in financial markets, healthcare, crypto-mining and high technology sectors, signed a deal with BurstIQ in which it invested $5 million. Health data not only exists in silos but is also bound by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations, making it difficult to share the information. BurstIQ is attempting to solve these challenges by leveraging blockchain and machine intelligence to allow data to be brought together in a repository for efficient sharing. BurstIQ is HIPAA-compliant.
While there is a great deal of investment in blockchain startups, many companies are choosing to develop the technology internally. At SXSW HealthSpark last week, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Medable Inc., an app and analytics platform for healthcare, announced INSIGHT, a blockchain-powered platform that enables medical data exchange among patients, medical researchers and biopharmaceutical companies. Medable is launching this blockchain network in order to combat low research participation for new drugs as well as inadequate public funding for research and a lack of meaningful data sharing among research groups.
Blockchain technology will enable “auditable, transparent, and self-directed data sharing of digitome data.” In fact, “as researchers use the Medable platform, they are able to contribute data to the digitome in exchange for funding and other research resources. Access to the dataset can then be requested by third parties via smart contracts, which utilize self-sovereign digital participant identities to give individual participants the power to consent and be rewarded for sharing the requested research data and/or consideration of a related clinical trial.” The company raised $5 million in funding in February.
In a detailed blog post, David Houlding, director of Healthcare Privacy and Security at Intel Corp.’s Intel Health and Life Sciences unit and Heather Flannery, CEO of Obesity Prevention, Policy, and Management, Inc., set out to provide best practices and key use cases for how blockchain technology might affect the healthcare ecosystem in the future.
Layer 0 represents where the world is today — “the majority of healthcare data today is stored within various enterprise system data silos with healthcare providers, payers, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, or business associates/data processors.” This data should be shared in order to improve quality of care and to lower costs.
Layer 1 represents the next logical step, blockchain, as it enables the sharing of data between healthcare organizations — “Existing healthcare B2B networks have been identified as near-term opportunities for blockchain to add value. These range from clearinghouse networks, health information exchanges, drug and medical device supply chains, provider credentialing networks, clinical data sharing networks and many others.”
Layer 2 involves smart contracts can be “built upon blockchains and introduce executable code that can trigger on matching blockchain transactions, automate processing, and output results onto the blockchain.” They will enable “more code to be executed directly on blockchains, versus only within healthcare organizations enterprise systems as is done today.”
As for Layer 3, cryptocurrencies and tokens can then be introduced, as they are built upon blockchains and smart contracts. The article states “cryptocurrencies and tokens may make sense for some healthcare blockchain use cases and enable new commerce and incentive systems. For example, patients may earn cryptocurrency or tokens by participating in clinical research studies using blockchain, and redeem this value to help offset their healthcare costs.”
And finally, Layer 4 points to artificial intelligence and machine learning, which, for example, “can help analyze various types of scans for heart disease and lung cancer, enabling earlier detection and improving patient care options.”
Blockchain technology stands to significantly improve the healthcare industry as we know it. Lisk is excited to greatly contribute to the sea of change that this industry and many others are about to experience.
To learn more about Lisk, visit us at lisk.io.
by Jennifer Tekneci
