Blockchain in Healthcare (Part I)

Visualize the Healthcare ecosystem comprising of patients, payers, providers, pharma/bio majors, and medical device companies. Blockchain Technology combined with other relevant digital forces can augment the right set of capabilities in the Healthcare Ecosystem. The blockchain technology alongside Electronic Health Records, IMoT (Internet of Medical Things), Healthbots, AI/ML, Cloud and Analytics can create the capability foundation for the healthcare industry. The blockchain bundled capability engine thereby enables the four drivers as described below.

1. Consumerization: Transforming from wholesale to retail healthcare. The patient or consumer now can expect the same experience in healthcare like in all other parts of their “consumer life.” Blockchain can enable a radical change in driving patients to take advantage of connected technologies, social tools, and information activities in their own health and that extends further into the broader marketplace.

2. Personalization: Healthcare industry has historically treated patients en masse. But the move from the group to the individual is inevitable now. Blockchain empowers health players to build loyal relationships with consumers offering more choices.

3. Diagnosis & treatments: Blockchain can create a single source of medical truth of patient that can’t be tampered making the doctors better at their jobs — quicker, more accurate, and fact-based expediting the quality of diagnosis and treatment.

4. Communications: Enabling doctor’s effective and easy communication with patients for improvising care coordination is another pertinent role of blockchain technology in healthcare.
   The above drivers collectively are positioned to deliver the following outcomes to healthcare ecosystem.

Patients: Improved experience with better care coordination
Payers: Shift from B2B to B2B2C models
Providers/ISVs: Better usability enabling on-the-go services and health predictability
To better contextualize Blockchain Technology in Healthcare ecosystems, the relevance of technology for Patients, Payers, and Providers will be discussed in the blog post. Tune in!