Idiots guide to Blockchain and Healthcare

Did you know that they recently changed the spelling of blockchain to “B-L-O-C-K-C-H-A-I-N” from what it used to be spelt as ‘B-I-T-C-O-I-N”!  Thanks to many experts and entrepreneurs who have transformed blockchain from a vertical innovation to a horizontal innovation. 

My focus in this article is to introduce you to how blockchain can transform healthcare industry. It is interesting because healthcare has predominantly been focusing on vertical innovation eg: Robotic surgery. We still have lots of paper documents, ownership of data is not where it is supposed to be, lack of trust and loads of privacy issues. The question that we are trying to answer is “Can blockchain be the inflection point of this industry?”. Don’t google yet! You will find more than 100,000 videos and over a million hits. Believe me, “Blockchain and healthcare” is the most abused search on google in recent past.

Blockchain is a growing list of interconnected records called blocks, which are linked using cryptography.

Before we even talk about adaption of blockchain in healthcare, you need to know certain key words that are integral part of blockchain: Distributed ledger, Security & Privacy and Smart contracts.  Distributed ledger in its simplest form, is a database held and updated independently by each participant (or node) in a large network. It is secured with cryptography and cannot be updated. This can only be shared to authorized personnel which in blockchain terms is called smart contracts.

Now that we understand blockchain, next question is do we have a problem to solve or are we inventing a problem that this technology can solve! Patient data today is owned by the respective stakeholders like hospitals, labs who are the creators of the data, and it is not seamlessly interoperable. Even when a lab shares data with hospital, it is with a specific hospital and patient is still not authorizing it to be shared in many geographical health systems. When a patient goes to meet physician, patient invariably carries the lab records. To summarize, there are two problems here.

1. Who is owning patient data

2. No seamless Interoperability

This can be solved only when the primary actor of the use case which is patient, owns the data and all other stakeholders add additional transaction sets. When patient goes to a physician or a hospital, they can access patient data once patient approves. Now physician can see complete history of patient data which is available in the chain. This will make everyone’s life easy, eg: physician may not request for a test that was conducted recently and keep costs low. Apart from solving the two problems mentioned above, Regulators can keep tab on population health by building analytical solutions which can mine transaction sets for value care.

Why are we still talking about future and not implementing it? Is GDPR an issue? Who will take the financial and environmental costs of implementing these systems? You can google it now and we shall discuss this more in detail once you read.