Blockchain Adoption: Key Healthcare Beneficiaries
Healthcare IT is an arena where one finds silos of data marts and standards. Enterprise applications have designed their data schema and storage processes independently. Given the privacy and confidentiality associated with patient data, it is an expected design strategy that everyone has followed. As a consequence, core healthcare functions like patient care coordination, claims, billing, clinical trials and data management have all suffered with ad hoc integration efforts. Fortunately, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel with blockchain promising to overcome all these issues with a decentralized architecture for ease of data exchange. The enormous hype with which blockchain has arrived, let us look at some real beneficiaries should it be deployed in healthcare industry.
Insurance
With verified and documented patient behaviour on the blockchain, insurance companies can rely on the patient lifestyle data to incentivize on their premiums. Patients with verified wellness data, collected from connected devices, viz., fitbit, Apple Watches, diet and other wellness mobile apps, can qualify discounts and other freebies from the insurance. This will help in building the patient-insurance relationships and can foster their future business.
Research / Clinical Trials
Patient generated health data (PGHD) with the quality, volume and level of security that blockchains promises, it could unlock massive potential for clinical trials and research. Currently, with the silo’ed data storage, there is hardly any data sharing at the expense of confidentiality. And whatever data is available for trials is of low quality and often unreliable. Blockchains could get crucial clinical trial data to the research organizations that need them most. The other aspect is of data quality; often trials are held in countries with minimal data transparency laws which result in the trials being unreliable for final reporting. The key feature of blockchain of public transparency can resolve these issues and add enormous value to healthcare industry.
Management
Using blockchain for patient records management and bridging the data gaps in traditional data stores can increase efficiencies and keep the medical business more vibrant economically. With inbuilt dataflow and smart contracts the data sharing can be in a secure and compliant way. It will be easy to store, move and manage share (SMMS) using blockchain framework.
Patient
The major beneficiary in the whole blockchain implementation in healthcare is invariably the patient, as it will help him / her gain the rightful ownership of all his / her healthcare data. For all along, the patient data was managed in proxy by the provider or insurance in pockets. Blockchain will give the patients the freedom to move from one provider to another without losing the control of his / her data. Patient will have the full control of who, what data and for how long his / her data will be accessed. Blockchain will make the patient the primary decision maker in healthcare data management. The provenance of patient’s data will also help in getting a care which is holistic in nature and not based on just symptoms.
Realization of Benefits
For key healthcare stakeholders worried about the blockchain implementation costs, it is important to realize that this will not be done by replacing the time tested legacy systems. Blockchain will not be replacing all data stores but will provide a secure and reliable conduit for ease of data exchange between applications and existing infrastructure.
Blockchain potential is in becoming a “middle-ware” to all healthcare data. This will be akin to messaging protocols that we witnessed in the mid-90s, which provided the interoperability and at the same time increased efficiencies of the existing application multi-fold.
