Warren Buffet, JP Dimon, Ben Bernanke, all seem to have an opinion on Blockchain and its most famous application, Bitcoin. If you leave cryptocurrencies aside, almost everybody agrees that Blockchain is on its way to transform the financial services. However, the magic of blockchain is not restricted to Wall Street.

The power of decentralized ledger can also help stakeholders reimagine healthcare and usher in a revamp in how healthcare generates, uses, saves and shares data.

The impact of Blockchain on the drug supply chain, clinical trials, billing management, will be measured in hundreds of billions of dollars and even more importantly save millions of lives and billions of man hours.

The trickle-down impact of blockchain on overall US economy will also be immense as healthcare spending is projected to account for 20% of the nation’s economy by the end of the year 2025.

Patients, data, and the shortcomings of the current system.

In an era, where patient numbers are increasing due to accumulating health issues, managing health-related data is becoming increasingly complex, which is adding unnecessary cost to the hospitals and healthcare institutions.

Other problems which are currently faced by the healthcare industry have been presented as follows:

Fake Medicines:

Fake medicines are entering the medical supply chain and causing health issues among people and multi-billion dollar losses to healthcare companies (precisely, an annual loss of $200 billion to US businesses). Although regulatory authorities are attempting to solve the issue, yet it has not delivered satisfactory results, and the problem of counterfeiting is multiplying with the passage of time.

Inappropriate Data Storage:

Storage of patient records on a centralized database in a disorganized manner exposes the entire data to attacks and unauthorized access by hackers. The estimates suggest that 5.579 million records of patient’s information were lost or modified in the year 2017 resulting in an estimated loss of $380 per record lost which is the highest amount among other industries.

Lack of Timely Availability of Data:

Information stored among different departments in the organizations is not properly accessible when needed, and users face many challenges while attempting to retrieve/exchange this life-saving data. This results in a clueless healthcare ecosystem and increased cost of maintaining patient records.

Billing:

Managing the billing information manually requires extensive resources to perform tasks like maintaining records of phone or email conversations. This data management is time and money consuming, and favors errors, delays treatments, and scatters physicians and staff work.

The issues related to incomplete patient records can be addressed through the implementation of a blockchain-based solution.

A decentralized database would provide different healthcare professionals all over the world with consolidated data records of every patient including medical examination’s results, a medication currently used, health insurance policies details and historical treatments obtained etc.

Paradigm shift.

Security of critical patient data is of paramount importance for the healthcare industry.

The HIPAA privacy rule further enhances the regulatory burden on all healthcare providers to ensure data privacy at all costs.

Different elements of a patient’s data can be distributed over multiple doctors, specialists or wearable devices, and can be combined at one place using blockchain technology. It will allow for data to be always tamper-proof, updated and accessible to only authorized personnel.

Elimination of the need for a central administrator will increase the security of confidential patient information, and establish control over individual information as there would be no central repository to attack.

The security and trust the blockchain brings to patient data can also be applied to data around drugs for better tracking and authentication, as a way to eliminate risks of fake medicine.

Here are more applications of the blockchain to the current healthcare system.

Data Integrity:

Once uploaded on the blockchain platform through smart contracts, the medical record of any patient or results of any clinical trials can be modified by only authorized persons, which ensures the integrity of the entire database of the organization.

Transparency throughout the data chain, defining the changes made by a physician, and the feature of seeking the consent of patients before sharing data among different organizations, also strengthens the trust among all stakeholders with respect to security of the system.

Availability of Information under One Roof:

The introduction of blockchain in healthcare will serve physicians with fast, reliable and real-time patient records including information regarding medical history, medications prescribed, previous test report result etc.

Centralized Information Database:

A central Health Information Exchange (patient-mediated and patient-driven) can facilitate the interoperability through the exchange of patient-related data between different healthcare institutions.

Saving in Administrative Cost:

Smart contracts will enable automatic processing of certain transactions between different players, reducing overhead cost. The time spent on time-consuming transactions will also be reduced or eliminated, which in turn will increase the operational efficiency of the workforce and improve the overall working of the healthcare organizations.

Automatic Processing of Claims:

Handling claims through smart contracts will allow for automatic processing of claims across organizations. This will help to reduce the litigation on medical claims.

The bills generated will automatically be verified against the patient’s health insurance policies allowing for fast and smooth processing of claims.

Improvement in Clinical Trial Processes:

The high cost of drug development, longer development periods and reduced success rates are some of the consequences of the traditional trial system which affects both healthcare institutions and patients.

The distributed network technology the blockchain uses verifies each entry before it is stored along with the historical trial data. Data provenance is of paramount importance in such clinical trials and only blockchain can deliver this Holy Grail.

What it means for hospitals, doctors, patients, governments.

Efficient Data Management:

Blockchain can help create a decentralized content management system that will save organizations from challenges like reliability, security and real-time accessibility of data.

The data can also be housed in a permissioned blockchain where a central authority will be responsible for granting conditional access to multiple participants.

So, a low-level healthcare provider will be able to access the diagnostic results of the patient but, they might not have permission to check previous health history.

Payment Processing and Health Insurance Claims Settlement:

Duplication and overcharging for certain services, billing for services which have never been performed, performing redundant services, processing fraudulent insurance claims and misrepresentation are some of the common healthcare practices causing losses to both healthcare companies and patients.

Application of blockchain will help automate the entire procedure of billing with greater auditability, and link the insurance data with the patient data, thereby eliminating problems faced in claims settlement.

Clinical Research:

Even though medical records have been digitized, certain loopholes in the systems still discourage patients and healthcare institutes to share data with other organizations and research institutions.

This limits the scope of clinical research and results in inefficient patient treatments.

The increased cost of data consolidation and de-identification also renders it uneconomical.

High degree of transparency, encryption of data, patients ownership of control over the database, traceability, and time-stamping features offered by blockchain will provide research institutions secured access to a vast volume of data, helping them to generate accurate data trial results.

Monitor the Entire Supply Chain Network:

Supply chain network of any drug organization includes the tracking of product from its point of inception to the point of dispatch will now be possible.

Verification through the conventional system may result in human errors, fraudulent transactions, improper communication and delays in decision-making.

Blockchain creates an immutable ledger that can be leveraged for authenticating the drugs in the supply chain.

Safety and Security of Data:

Security in blockchain is assured by transferring the stewardship of information to the patient (through smart contracts) instead of physicians. Any modifications in the dataset can only be made when all system nodes validate it. This leaves no room for a security breach.

Blockchain in Healthcare today.

Doc.AI – Patient data ownership

The startup was founded in the year 2016 in Palo Alto by Walter and Sam De Brouwer. The data on the platform is stored and analyzed using blockchain technology along with natural language processing and computer vision.

Patient records are collected from the hospitals, pharmacies, and laboratories using the advanced infrastructure of Doc.AI.
The data scientists use the information retrieved from the platform to prepare insights and make predictions regarding the health of individual patients and the generations to come.

The patients will then bring such data to the medical consultant with whom their treatment is ongoing who will use such insights to suggest appropriate treatment.

The data is kept under the complete control of patients, and is shared with research centers only after obtaining the consent of the patients.

FarmaTrust – Drug audit and authentication

The London based company has developed a platform that improves the efficiency of organization by eliminating the incidence of counterfeit drugs and improving the overall supply chain network.

It uses Artificial Intelligence and big data analytical tools to monitor activities of healthcare organizations in real time, and ensures the delivery of genuine drugs everywhere.

The platform will connect individual pharmaceuticals, hospitals, manufacturers, logistics companies, wholesalers, retailers and vendors to a centralized digital system to increase visibility, identify the incidence of fraudulent activities and reduce the supply chain cost.

The features in the system can be configured depending on the different regulatory requirements of countries. A free smartphone app allows patients to test the authenticity of medicines by scanning the barcode.

SimplyVital Health – Healthcare SaaS

SimplyVital Health is a private company founded in the year 2017 by Katherine Kuzmeskas and Lucas Hendren. It aims to develop enterprise software by using decentralized technology to serve the healthcare industry effectively.

The Company is leveraging technology in healthcare with the use of open source software (HIPAA-compatible blockchain protocol) to improve data accessibility and minimize the cost of healthcare among organizations.

Its current proprietary platform, ConnectingCare, provides support to organizations for bundled payments to effectively manage their risky contracts. The software integrates the client’s existing infrastructure with blockchain to offer less expensive onboarding and flexibility in maintaining records; it also assists in tracking financials and preparing advanced analytics.

The software also allows the sharing of data between different providers along with creating a secure audit trial to improve the security of the entire system.

The Company has also recently developed software named Health Nexus (Token-protected data security system) to help patients and healthcare professionals around the world to securely interact and share data.

Chronicled – Smart Supply Chain

Chronicled is a San Francisco based technology company which uses blockchain and IoT to create smart supply chain systems (including multi-party systems) for physical assets and enterprises as a whole.

The company was founded in 2014 and since then engaged in building solutions focused on enhancing business operations and reducing the cost of reconciliation in inventory management. SF Weekly cited the company as San Francisco's Best Tech Company of 2018.

In 2017, it entered into partnerships with various pharmaceutical companies including McKesson, Pfizer, Genentech, Abbvie and AmerisourceBergen to design a technique to record private supply chain events on blockchain ledger.

MediLedger was one of such initiatives which proved the importance of blockchain over other technologies in tracking the supply chain network.

Patientory - data ownership:

Physicians use patient data to provide accurate treatment. The processing of such data has become increasingly challenging due to the increase of patient data generated daily.

The data generated is, also, increasingly at risk of the incidence of cyber-attacks.

This evolution has necessitated the development of applications that can easily process and handle a large volume of data that can be used for physicians and healthcare institutions.

Patientory was founded in 2015 to address these issues. The supervisory team of the company has more than 40 years of combined experience in developing healthcare technology companies.

Patientory allows patients, doctors, and healthcare organizations to encrypt, store and transfer medical data by creating electronic medical records providing better security features while also complying with the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) requirements. The platform uses encrypted middleware to prevent phishing attacks on sensitive patient data while also allowing the exchange of information among family members, specialist physicians, caretakers and nurses through its safe and secure messaging app.

Other Noticeable players: Nebula Genomics, Gem Health, Guardtime are also pushing the boundaries for blockchain in healthcare.

Conclusion

Though blockchain technology is currently not extensively being used in the healthcare industry, big players in the sector understand its ability to reimagine the fundamentals of healthcare data.

As per a survey conducted by IBM, it is expected that 56% of the healthcare institutes will incorporate blockchain in their systems some or the other way by the end of 2020.

The positive change in healthcare, both in terms of quality care and cost control, will revolutionize the industry and make our world a better place.

This analysis was brought to you by the blockchain team at Swish.