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– Healthcare blockchain technology has the potential to transform patient care, said Bill Frist, a heart and lung transplant surgeon, former Senate majority leader, and president of the executive board of the health service investment company Cressey & Company .
Blockchain will be able to break down EHR silos, simplify reconciliation of the revenue cycle and health supply chains, make patient data more accessible and safe for patients and researchers, and synchronize health care and wearability data with EHR, Frist expected in a recent Forbes article.
"Blockchain is permanently and rapidly moving towards production in real healthcare settings, but it is expected to be a $ 2 trillion-dollar industry … Technology will change care as we know it: moving the locus of care in the community, in the home environment, meeting the patient where I am, "he wrote.
Frist was a keynote speaker at the Distributed: Health conference held in Nashville last week. During his speech, he said that health care is "ripe for interruptions like no other industry, the reason is that we have a very, very, very high cost that the typical consumer can not afford and we have irregular access ".
"When it comes at a high cost and you have irregular access, the macro environment for interruption is huge and that's where Blockchain is," he said.
"Without access to real, reliable, privacy-protected, distributed data … we can not make real progress," Frist added. "Blockchain has the opportunity … to address one of the basic needs of society, which is to make sure our children have a better life, have better health than we have".
Michael Jacobs, a senior engineer at Optum, also spoke at the conference. "One of the things we learned [blockchain] the technology is that it is more suitable when you have more organizations involved, "said Jacobs." You want to guide your ship to a focus on use case. "
Optum is one of several healthcare companies that have come together to form the Synaptic Health Alliance to explore how blockchain can be used to improve health care. Other members include Humana, MultiPlan, Quest Diagnostics and UnitedHealthcare.
Synaptic's first pilot project, launched in April 2018, is examining the application of blockchain technology to ensure that the most up-to-date information on healthcare providers is available in the lists of providers managed by health insurers. The pilot is examining how data sharing among health organizations on blockchain technology can improve data accuracy, simplify administration, reduce costs and improve access to care.
Also at the conference was Emily Vaughn, Product Director at Change Healthcare. "What we're really trying to do is bring the first intelligent contract platform to the healthcare industry, and what we see is an opportunity to build development tools that enable healthcare engineers to quickly design and build blockchain applications."
Hashed Health's CEO, John Bass, commented: "If you think of 2016, it was all about building the community … 2017 has been a lot of company work, many conversations with big insurance companies, big pharmaceutical companies … on how companies could be involved … Now, in 2018, we have seen this change … The change I have noticed is that conversations are much more mature, the public is much more mature, the level of thought, practicality .. It is much more advanced and much more mature than we have seen in the past. "
The CEO of Solve.Care, Pradeep Goel, has predicted that, once the return on investment (ROI) has been demonstrated, the blockchain use cases in the healthcare sector will be "flooded".
"Health care is ready to adopt blockchain [technology] if you can demonstrate a clear ROI, "said Goel." This is not a problem when blockchain will start working in the healthcare sector. It's starting to work. "
Using blockchain technology, Solve.Care has developed a digital and token portfolio to enable seamless data and payments to be exchanged between suppliers and patients. The Arizona Care Network is currently using its product, he said.
