Blockchain in the Healthcare Ecosystem

In recent times, ‘Horizontal Innovation’ is how Health Practitioners are describing block-chain and its potential for disruption in the profession. A distributed and secure ledger of data has the potential of solving major qualitative, quantitative and efficacy issues faced by the healthcare professionals and hospital management staff.

Some advantages that are giving impetus to block-chain gaining ground in hospital boardrooms are:

• It is distributed and not owned by any one entity.
• The data is encrypted to the highest standards of encryption.
• The data is tamper proof
• The blockchain is transparent and verifiable.

As per a combined research by three prominent universities (source), ’several problems in healthcare stem from the complex network of intermediaries and the lack of traceability of transactions. To mention a few: healthcare data is fragmented across several silos negatively affecting research and services, about half of the clinical trials are never reported, the cost of drug discovery is ever increasing, and substandard and fake medicines are still a huge problem. Blockchain has the potential to solve these problems as it provides trust without any intermediaries, has traceability as a default feature, and promises new business models by enabling novel incentive structures. Due to its potential, blockchain has gathered significant interest in the healthcare industry.’

Trust and transparency is what the industry is looking for to accelerate innovation in extending quality health care faster and in a more efficient manner.

Block-chain can bring far-reaching disruptions in the fields of

• Patient Data Management
• Credentials Mapping
• Pharmaceutical Research
• Supply Chain Management of medical goods
• Prescription Management
• Billing Claims Management
• Analytics
• Telemedicine

Blockchain can bring interoperability of patients’ data amongst hospitals and research organizations without the need of any intermediaries for sharing of such critical data. Patient data is scattered across different entities in the healthcare value chain referred to as data silos and sharing of data is prone to a multi-level process of permission control. Because of this, oftentimes crucial data is not accessible and available at the time of urgent need. Blockchain can solve this issue with health information exchange (HIE) by serving as a basis for a trusted decentralized database. It can enable one-stop access to the entire medical history of a patient across all healthcare providers. Access control system built using trust on blockchain puts patients in control of their data; they can grant consent and access rights to external parties like researchers to have access to all or subset of their medical records. This feature fits nicely with the patient-centric model of healthcare where blockchain can act as a catalyst inducing trust.

Another important aspect of interoperability of data is the data of healthcare workers applying to offer their services to the system.

“When we are interviewing a new surgeon, a new nurse, a new radiation tech, or whatever position, candidates have to provide credentials that verify that they graduated medical school, that they completed residency, that they took all their necessary exams and passed them, that they’re current with their boards, that they have had a certain number of education credits, that they have a certificate in managing this radiation machine or know how to place a central line, or whatever,” said Roger Smith, PhD, chief technology officer at the AdventHealth Nicholson Center sad in 2018.

Verified data can be shared between agencies and Healthcare Institutes/hospitals to reduce the time needed to verify the details of applicants to a few hours instead of the current 2 – 3 months that majority of Healthcare Facilities are forced to take.

Due to lack of data exchange that is verified and true, pharma companies and Healthcare Institutes are missing important deadlines in addressing critical research in pandemic situations that arise out of the blue. Blockchain could solve this problem as verified data and insights could be readily available in a closed / private blockchain research network for everyone to access.

The pharmaceutical companies are also suffering from, at a global scale, from problems like counterfeiting of drugs and lack of efficient and secure systems of logistics. Counterfeit drugs alone cost these companies, nearly $200 billion+ annually. A distributed ledger like blockchain integrated with technologies based on IOT can be the right solution to solve this problem at scale.

It is possible to write custom laws and rules forming contracts on the blockchain, which are equivalent to real-world contracts and can be legally binding. These contracts are referred to as smart contracts. Smart contracts can be used in several processes within healthcare including billing and insurance which helps in automating the process and reducing time and costs in fulfilling claims.

Blockchain can have a huge positive impact on all three pillars of analytics: data, model, and computation. Data generated via blockchain is verified, scrubbed and ready to use, “Multiple model predictions can be pooled using a blockchain network to create a final robust model; prediction of an ensemble of models is usually more correct than individual predictions.” And computation has the potential of being the quickest and most precise as distributed computational capabilities are leveraged.

Telemedicine is another area in healthcare that can benefit from blockchain technology by introducing a trust layer between patients and healthcare professionals. Blockchain-based telemedicine platform can validate professional identity and data integrity, ensure transparency and traceability, and incentivize the players to act fairly by providing incentive metrics such as reputation scores and crypto tokens. Within telemedicine, it is likely that the remote diagnostic services will be at the forefront of blockchain adoption. It can be expected that diagnostic services solely based on quantitative and qualitative interpretation of medical data in the absence of a patient will be first to adopt blockchain technology successfully.

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Some of the top Indian Startups facilitating the Healthcare Services vertical are:

MindDeft

This startup, established in 2015, has been focusing on developing blockchain apps for efficient business processes. Their services of relevance to Healthcare domain consist of smart contracts, token sale, private blockchain, distributed ledger, and legal contracts. This startup has been working with platforms like Ethereum, Hyperledger, Stellar, Quorum, EOS, Tron, and R3 Corda for its projects.

PSI PHI Blockchain Labs

This startup has its headquarters in Bangalore and was established in 2016. Founded by Gaurav Kumar, Aditya Prasad and Harsh Pokharna, PSI PHI Blockchain labs mainly work in the supply chain, telecom and healthcare industries, and offers products like Crypto Locker (store and share documents on the blockchain using APIs), and Digi Rail (multi-party shared database) for supply chain data flow optimisation.

Primechain

Another blockchain startup serving solutions for Healthcare domain is Primechain. Founded in 2016 by Rohas Nagpal and Shinam Arora, Primechain Technologies develops blockchain-based solutions like. It has a collaboration with 27 banks across India and the Middle East for verification, authentication and storage of electronic records. The company offers products like Primechain CONTRACT, Promechain API and Primechain LOAN.

Sofocle

Sofocle, headquartered at Noida, provides consultation on wallets, exchanges, smart contracts and private blockchain products. Some of their products include SofoCap, supply chain financing solution; SofoChain, a product for supply solution; and SofoInsure, an autonomous claim processing solution.

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There is an ever accelerating interest in Blockchain for the Healthcare value chains globally.  The current pandemic crisis has put more pressure on the Healthcare researchers, practitioners and patients in handling it in a better way. Research into blockchain and its applications is still in its nascent stage in India, and needs to gather pace to remove inefficiencies of human interventions and bringing in much needed automations. In addition, Indian policymakers need to take it up as a pet project to drive investment and policy formulation in this domain to give impetus to research and drive rapid prototyping.