Blockchain technology in healthcare

Blockchain technology first became popular several years ago and is still gaining momentum today. The concept is discussed on a regular basis at technology events and workshops everywhere. Blockchain has even gained worldwide status, with everyone from the Nigerian government to the President of the United States and everyone in between. 

Despite its popularity, few people seem to be able grasp what exactly blockchain is. Forbes contributor, Reenita Das, says that the reasons behind all of the confused hype over blockchain is twofold: 1) the absence of any actual standardized definition of blockchain and 2) its controversial and often debated true point of origin.

However, considering its possibly disruptive nature and wonderfully complex effect that blockchain technology could have on all business across all industries require its understanding, at least on a basic level.

What is Blockchain?

William Mougayar, an expert on cryptocurrency said that to understand the blockchain, you have to understand five big themes:

1) decentralized consensus (on or off bitcoins);

2) the blockchain itself (and services);

3) smart contracts (and other smart property);

4) trusted computing (or trustless transactions);

5) proof of work (and proof of stake).

As seen in Bitcoin, blockchain is the distributed and immutable (written, but unedited) digital record of events. The technology can be shared between different ecosystem participants or parties across peer-to-peer networked database systems.

One of the key strengths behind a blockchain system is the integrity that lies behind the data and its networked immutability. While the technology exists to build layers of applications on top of the main blockchain system that enable other functionalities (such as in self-executing mechanics), this is not part of blockchain core functionality.

Bitcoin is the most commonly identified application of blockchain technology, but it is only one of several hundred different applications that use the blockchain technology.

Applying blockchain technology to the healthcare industry, it is easy to see its culpability and propensity for being disruptive. Blockchain may not be able to solve every single problem in the digital healthcare industry, but it does have great evolutionary possibilities as long as trust and governance are part of what defines the core properties behind the technology and its application.

The first industry that took a noticeable hold on the potential for blockchain technology was the industry of financial services. Financial services grew their model based on the three big themes:

1) Applications and solutions (such as wallets and ATMs)

2) Middleware and services (such as services and platforms)

3) Infrastructure and base protocols (public and payment).

Key Benefits of Blockchain Technology in the Healthcare Industry

Blockchain technology brings several intriguing new opportunities and key benefits to the healthcare industry.

The use of blockchain technology can address several primary concerns when it comes to medical records, including security, privacy, and scalability.

Put into practice, blockchain can be applied to the healthcare industry in the following manner:

1) Patient. A patient can be provided with a code (a private key or hash) and an address to where the code can be used to unlock their patient data. When the patient's data is not stored in the blockchain, the blockchain provides the authentication, or required hashes (multi-signatures or multi-sigs) to be used in order to access the data. This process is called identification and authentication.

2) Provider: Providers and other contributors to the patient's medical records are also provided a signature (codes, hashes, or multi-sig) that, when combined with the patient's code, unlocks the patient's data.

3) Profile: The patient can modify their profile to require certain access rules to unlock their medical records

4) Access: If the patient defines that 2 of 2 codes must be followed, then two separate computers would have to be compromised before the data could be breached.

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Population Health Management

Blockchain has made health information exchanges and all-payer claims databases obsolete. Whereas organizations would normally be trusted to verify the trustworthiness of members, those organizations are not necessary with blockchain technology.

By eliminating the middleman verification organizations, blockchain actually increases the security of data and saves healthcare businesses time, resources, and money that would normally be required to ensure the third-party verifiers were indeed doing their job.

In 2007, the government of Estonia partnered with Guardtime, a leader in cybersecurity that uses blockchain's technology of Keyless Signature Infrastructure, in an effort to provide authentication on a scale that had never been seen before. The two entities worked together to verify the integrity of blockchain in data-at-rest on a massive, global scale.

Estonia is known as one of the only digital societies that keeps 100 percent of their medical health records in digital format online. Estonia saw that it no longer made sense to allocate time, money, and resources towards third-party verifications when blockchain was available. Supporters of blockchain technology rave about its ability to provide trust where it had not been before by linking information directly to financial and clinical outcomes.

Healthcare Mobile Communications and Notifications

Tierion is a program that uses blockchain to transform the way the world shares and secures data. Tierion was designed to record information in the blockchain, collect data from the web and from mobile apps, and send data to other programs and systems using form submissions. Existing mobile applications can possibly be amplified through combined use with Tierion. Tierion supports well over 400 different applications, including Gmail, Google Sheets, and Slack. Tierion was incorporated by the Department of Economic and Community Development of Connecticut when they conducted a survey of the top 200 technology companies. Using blockchain technology to form a global platform, Tierion can verify multiple data sets, files, or processes and use API and tools to anchor a permanent and timestamped proof of data in the blockchain.

References:

Das, R. (2017, May 8). Does Blockchain Have a Place in Healthcare? [Web]. Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/reenitadas/2017/05/08/does-blockchain-have-a-place-in-healthcare/#781f61e91c31

Nichol, P. (2016, March 17). Blockchain Applications for Healthcare. [Web]. Retrieved from: https://www.cio.com/article/3042603/innovation/blockchain-applications-for-healthcare.html