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Doctorlink CEO Rupert Spiegelberg writes about the technology he believes should be adopted in the future, as the COVID-19 pandemic sparked the embrace of digital technologies.
When a group of developers launched Bitcoin in 2009, it is unlikely they were thinking about whether or not they were at the pinnacle of a major medical breakthrough. After all, the promise of lower transaction fees than offered by traditional online payment methods was a concept rooted in finance at the time.
The idea was simple. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency and therefore can be traded without central banks. All that was required was a digital ledger capable of distributing the currency. So, not unlike many medical breakthroughs, when developers focused on one area, they actually made a superior discovery in another. Once the furore around cryptocurrencies subsided, commentators were quick to point out that it could be the underlying ledger, blockchain, that could indeed have broader applications.
So what does a public ledger have to do with healthcare and why is it relevant now, over a decade after the invention of the blockchain?
The question cannot be answered just by referring to COVID-19 but it is important. The pandemic has created numerous obstacles in the provision of care, including concerns about viral spread in primary care, potential shortcomings in critical care capacity, and difficulties in obtaining sufficient levels of personal protective equipment (PPE).
In less than two months, emergency room attendance was halved and there were concerns that people with severe conditions would stay away and not have access to the care they needed. In response, NHS England advised doctors’ practices to move to a full online triage system. Now the NHS is undergoing a complete overhaul of how it delivers healthcare, and clinicians have adopted a rapid roll-out of digital healthcare solutions that eliminate the need for face-to-face interactions with patients, but still deliver treatment.
It is therefore possible that the healthcare sector is entering a new era, one that will see a digital explosion that almost all other sectors have enjoyed over the past decade. We have all known for years that the demand for health care was slowly outstripping existing clinical resources as the population aged and the provision of health care became more expensive. COVID-19 has accelerated this problem by generating extraordinary demand on healthcare systems in a very short amount of time, making it clear that technology is the only way to meet these spikes in demand.
It all starts with personal data. The more elements that can be collected and analyzed, the better the picture of an individual’s health a doctor will get. This will make it easier for healthcare professionals to make more accurate assessments and potentially spot problems before they occur.
We are only at the beginning of this new era, where personal data becomes the basis of treatments and preventive care. However, despite its potential, data portability across multiple systems and services is a real problem. There is nothing more valuable to an individual than their personal health records, so making data shareable across services will inevitably raise concerns about the specter of data abuse.
Currently, data does not flow seamlessly between technological solutions within healthcare. For example, in the UK hospital medical records are not part of the family doctor’s records, but the benefits are obvious in terms of treatment and preventative care if they do. Unfortunately, a centralized storage and delivery system is unlikely to gain traction until there is one that can provide proper encryption and security.
However, it is a problem that a technology like blockchain can address. This is because the purpose of the chain is to store a series of transactions in a way that cannot be altered or changed. Each transaction is signed with a private key and then distributed among a group of peer to peer participants. Without a valid signature, new blocks created by data changes are ignored and not added to the chain. Even if it becomes a public artifact, the inspection of the blockchain does not reveal any data, only IDs and hash codes. That’s why it becomes an incorruptible digital ledger.
In principle, blockchain could be useful in any situation where we currently trust someone to manage our data in ways that help us interact. Instead of storing Bitcoin, blockchains could be used to store our medical records. In this way, we will regain ownership of our data, allowing others to interact with it at our convenience. The blockchain could therefore play a vital role in supporting our digital advancement and giving healthcare professionals greater access to vital data.
Of course, the data itself is useless and intelligence is needed to interpret it and find patterns to generate benefits. For example, at Doctorlink we use patient data to evaluate, prioritize and refer patients to the right healthcare instantly at any time of the day or night in a process known as triage. Our online triage algorithms in some primary care clinics have created up to 30% additional capacity in the system simply by making sure the right patients see the right healthcare provider at the right time.
Digital transformation is coming to the healthcare sector. We have achieved great results over the past decade, but now we are looking forward to a new phase where technology will be used to improve the skills of doctors and enable them to operate at their maximum license. Not just by managing more patients, but by managing them more effectively and treating their conditions more easily. Blockchain’s unique ability to flexibly secure and store our data could provide the crucial step to enable healthcare to move with the times.
As a delivery system capable of ensuring proper encryption and security, blockchain could provide us with a platform to securely protect the exciting future of healthcare. With research already suggesting that 55% of all healthcare applications will use blockchain by 2025 and with global healthcare market spending on blockchain expected to reach $ 5.61 billion annually over the same period, blockchain technologies are set to become an important factor in future health programs.
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