How blockchain can be used for healthcare
Just last week, UnitedHealth and Quest Diagnostics, two of America’s largest healthcare companies, announced a joint blockchain pilot that might reduce costs and improve the quality of data accessible to medical firms. Alongside Optum, MultiPlan, and Humana, it represents one of the biggest industry-wide efforts yet to launch a mutually accessible, blockchain-powered infrastructure.
Most people rightly associate blockchain with cryptocurrency, but it has other applications. I’m still pretty new to the blockchain world, but have been in it long enough to explain something the casual news reader might not get: What does it offer?
Thanks — again — to Facebook’s precarious care of personal information, people are talking blockchain’s other uses. Private data needs security like bank accounts do. That attracts a lot of attention from industries where such data is critical, namely health.
Secured, audited data ownership
MedRec is a startup out of the MIT Media Lab that tries to protect that information. Founded by Dr. Andy Lipman, it also has a creative solution to get miners to participate in the chain. Instead of offering coins, MedRec would offer information.
MedRec is a step ahead of your thinking: Why would a startup portending to protect data effectively turn it into a currency to run its business? The intent is to offer permissioned data, although anonymized, to researchers and other medical pros in exchange for their participation as nodes. No information can be used without the expressed consent of its owner, the probable place where the MedRec equivalent of a private key would come in handy.
Better data; better treatment
That data still needs to be accessible. Plenty of people have not been able to keep track of their entire medical history. The dramatic shift to digital records in recent years might actually amplify the problem. In decades past, many might have expected to have more manual control over medical info, but now by default people expect records to be immediately accessible (when they actually aren’t).
One team trying to resolve the issue is Patientory, is fixing to create a universal information log. Instead of the current system, medical data for a certain patient will always be accessible on Patientory’s ledger.
“Our online technology utilizes blockchain which is distributed ledgers to eventually give patients lifelong access to that information regardless of what healthcare institution or provider they see,” Patientory Founder and CEO Chrissa McFarlane told Forbes just recently.
Similarly, SimplyVital Health and their product ConnectingCare launched last February to encourage doctors from different institutions to collaborate on shared patients. They want to build a health-specialized blockchain infrastructure called Health Nexus that ensures HIPAA compliance and comes along with a key pair system for authorized access. This past December, a startup called Curisium raised $3.5 million for its own blockchain.
Accurate data on doctors and hospitals — including things as simple as addresses — is hard to come by. The blockchain would create a collaborative platform for correcting this information. Other data — insurance plans accepted, affiliated medical centers, and even languages spoken — would be validated in the ledger. That data would make finding doctors according to experience, expertise, and location much less of a chore.
Reducing no-shows, better surveys
Data is not the end-all be-all of health (or any industry), and blockchain developers have considered ways to apply the technology to improve medical surveys and even patients showing up for their appointments.
That’s the claim of Healthereum, a company building ledgers specifically designed for the medical world. Their solution involves a little bit of incentivization: Participate in the chain of information with regular updates and receive tokens in return. Other projects are piloting similar schemes, gamifying blockchain participation as it were to get people to live healthier lives (Will it work? The jury’s hasn’t even started deliberations yet). Other projects like Etheal are trying to reward good behavior by patients, rewarding them tokens in their own ecosystem.
Medical billing without fraud
Healthcare costs are already crippling, especially for Americans. The amount of fraudulent billing in the U.S. alone is at least $68 billion. The system also gets rid of the middleman, reducing overhead costs for billing administration. Tracking the source of billing charges can inform users immediately if they are from legitimate sources. It also helps secure healthcare providers from fraudulent insurance claims.
A blockchain can do this not just by verifying the identity of who submits a smart contract for validation, but also the completeness of the data. As a report by Deloitte explains, a blockchain’s ability to pull together data from various sources can detect subtle things such as attempts at multiple billings by providers. Additionally, the blockchain might be able to conglomerate that data over into statistically significant analytics, then correlate it with instances of fraud to better recognize the telltale signs of fraudulent claims.
Tracing pharmaceuticals
People are talking about blockchain as a solution for many industries’ supply chains. Drug companies are looking into it for good reason. Controlled substances have until now only been controlled so well. For reasons of compliance it benefits drug companies; for reasons of efficiency, it would help pharmacists better understand a patient’s prescription history.
“There’s something that’s really cool about having your record follow you wherever you go without needing that data on you at all times,” Merck’s associate director for applied technology, Nishan Kulatilaka told MedCity News in 2016. “You’re no longer bound to your hospital system.”
Manufacturers, suppliers, prescribing doctors, pharmaceutical chains, and individual pharmacists would all be able to update these ledgers.
This is not an exhaustive list
This is just a sample. Some of the information here traces back more than a few weeks, meaning in the blockchain business it might already be out of date. As more people explore the technology and deploy it with their work, new ideas and novel applications will come up.
Demand for the services blockchain theoretically can provide and those it already demonstrably can will increase as more people become aware of its promise. Whether that is through the cryptocurrency world or one of many companies exploring new uses for decentralized ledgers is irrelevant. The innovative properties of blockchain are likely to soon bear themselves out.
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