Why Blockchain matters for Healthcare?
Blockchain could help solve some of the industry’s most pressing compliance, interoperability, and data security issues, as well as enable new patient-centric business models etc. I am trying to touch on the practical aspects of this subject below.
While there will be increasingly more opportunity to deploy blockchain applications, there are also merits to centralization as well, including speed, privacy, and more. Knowing when to opt for centralization vs. decentralization will be key. Imagine a world where anyone interacting with a patient would have access to the information they need to support a patient as soon as it was created. Here’s how it might work:
When a patient visits a physician, he gets diagnosed and prescribed with therapy, and the patient, in turn, signs a HIPAA release. The patient may opt into programs and channels to support their therapy on-boarding and treatment. These transactions are written to the blockchain.
Followed by that, the diagnosis, the consent granted, and the prescription is instantly made available to the patient insurance provider such that the action from the insurer can be posted back on to the blockchain. Such information simultaneously can be made available to the manufacturer who can map the patient into available programs based on patient consent.
With instantaneous and transparent blockchain data on approved benefits, the patient, the pharmacy and all stakeholders are updated with single source of truth enabling critical actions around financial assistance, drug fulfillment, and therapy training to initiate.
The constant updates to the blockchain on patient engagement can be made available with predefined access rights such that the relevant stakeholders real-time aware of the patient's status.
Evaluating on what exactly improved in the process with blockchain, the full-information state explained above is enabled by blockchain allows multiple points of care to act in concert on behalf of that patient instead of in a linear or worse, duplicative, fashion. The doctor, the payer, the hub, the manufacturer, the pharmacy, and other suppliers are all working from the same data set. They’re able to act faster and with more complete and trusted information. The operational burden around information exchange is dramatically reduced, and all parties can act with comfort knowing patient privacy rights are fully respected. The cost of patient management should go down and access to therapy should speed up.