Kumar Madurai, delivery manager and chief consultant of CTG Health Solutions in Buffalo, North Carolina, explains his predictions of the most significant blockchain applications in the healthcare sector over the next five years.
The answers have been slightly modified for clarity and length.
Question: where is now the blockchain in the health sector and how will it develop in 2019?
Kumar Madurai: Health agencies today are approaching the blockchain with wary optimism. Many recognize that there is enormous potential for health care, but they are still wary of the challenge, such as privacy of health data, performance and lack of standards. There are still obstacles to the adoption of public blockchains in health care due to the need to protect health data and new regulations such as the general data protection rules.
With this, the number of startup companies in the healthcare sector will continue to grow in 2019 and many of them are specifically looking to address these challenges. Blockchain-based consortia should also grow in number as they find cases of common use in the area of data exchange, such as hospitals in a health system or health plans in a specific region.
Q: What do you think will be the most significant blockchain applications in the healthcare sector over the next five years?
KM: Early adoption will take place in private or consortium-based blockchains, in which a trusted network of providers or healthcare systems can securely create and share data, such as provider directories and information on the credibility of the provider.
Another potential application that benefits all stakeholders in the healthcare system – payers, providers and patients – is the use of smart contracts to record insurance coverage and pre-authorization to speed up the approval process services and drugs covered. A more powerful extension of these smart contracts will be to integrate them with vendor billing systems, clearing houses and / or payment systems so that payments to suppliers can be automated once services are performed and reduce thus the administrative burden of processing requests.
The pharmaceutical industry is another promising area for blockchain. For example, to mitigate the problem of counterfeit medicines, a consortium of pharmaceutical companies, distribution networks and retail pharmacies can trace and record the movement of legitimate drugs on the blockchain using product identifiers such as radio frequency identification or bars.
Patient access to records is another opportunity. Given the challenges of privacy to protecting new types of health data such as genomic data or data from home health monitoring devices, a patient-centered blockchain predicts that the patient controls who has access to this information. Once the access rights determined by patients are recorded in smart contracts, designated providers can access them for treatment purposes or authorized researchers can use them in their studies.
Q: What should IT health managers know today in hospitals and healthcare systems to learn about the block chain?
KM: Understanding the key concepts of blockchain: general accounting of transactions, disintermediation of trust, immutability of data, etc. And how they can lead to innovative solutions in the health sector. Knowing what barriers exist today for the adoption of blockchains in the health sector, particularly with regard to the protection of patient data and privacy, and how they are addressed by technology vendors and new research. Learn more about specific health blockchain applications that have already been initiated by startups in this area and how some of the major healthcare systems are working with them.
Also, learn about local blockchain collaboration efforts involving payers and suppliers and explore the potential for participation in proof-of-concept and consortium-based projects.
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