Blockchain and Pharmacy
Ever heard of Bitcoin? How about blockchain?!
It’s pretty completed but here's my best shot at an overview. If you know how it works, skip to the next paragraph. Blockchain technology involves an innovative way to store and track data using peer to peer transactions that cannot be altered without permission. In addition, it’s innovative difference to most networks is the lack of central storage. The information is disbursed among different sites who’ve been allowed permission to verify and continue to pass on the data. Furthermore, there’s a whole crypto part of the tech that I’m not going to get into but it’s crazy! More details here.
But how does the creation of a new currency apply to pharmacy? Well, the possibilities could be endless but here are a few applications:
Drug Supply Tracking — The inherent tech behind blockchain is secured and super accurate tracking. Something needed in the drug supply chain. Having this tech can prevent and track loss while minimizing the risk of fraudulent drugs entering the market.
Managing health records — Blockchain can make it possible to share the health records of patients accurately and securely between healthcare providers at unrelated institutions.
Clinical Trials — The reason there’s an important application here is to be able to accurately track data and prevent inaccurate/fraudulent changes to potentially have an influence on results.
Today
There are a few companies in healthcare currently using the blockchain. Let’s check out two companies and see how they’re using the tech.
Script Drop
Script drop is actually a medication delivery company and they focus strongly on adherence. They’re using blockchain technology to manage their patient’s information which will allow them to track certain behaviors of their patients, like adherence. But here’s where this gets cool, when patients demonstrate proper adherence, they are then rewarded with digital tokens that can be used for certain health-related costs, like their copays. This could be a very serious preview of the future.
MedRec
MedRec, founded by researchers at the MIT Media Lab is building an Electronic Health Record (EHR) on type of blockchain technology. One interesting point with MedRec is their miners. Miners in blockchain are the individuals who help verify transactions to continue to the next block. When minors help in the efforts, they’re rewarded. With bitcoin, miners are rewarded with the currency of bitcoin. With MedRec, the miners are usually people who are involved in healthcare research so they’re rewarded instead with census level data. They’ll then have a bunch of data they can analyze and draw results from while at the same time helping with the integrity of the transactions of health information. It’s a win-win.
But there are a lot of barriers to this becoming common practice. Companies like MedRec and Script Drop are essentially start-ups. It’s a whole other ball game trying to get a large hospital system to adopt and invest in this type of technology, But, let’s be honest. It’s only a matter of time.
Thanks for reading.
Take care,
Richard
www.rxradio.fm
—
Richard Waithe, PharmD | Richard@rxradio.fm
